Sgarbi and other intellectuals to Conte: Let's reopen exhibitions and museums with restricted access, and get people outdoors

Art critic and historian Vittorio Sgarbi has appealed to Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to restart Italy from culture, suggesting the reopening of exhibitions and museums, subject to safety distances and medical measures deemed necessary to ensure the health of visitors. “This is an opportunity to call to reflection the men of culture who find themselves in the pride of Italian art and the Renaissance of which Raphael is the highest symbol,” Sgarbi began in his appeal. An appeal that Sgarbi calls “simple” and is based on a basic assumption: “that in the economic measures there are no cuts for culture, that, at the recovery, culture can be the first reference in an Italy that will have seen evidently for tourism many bookings from foreign countries cancelled, but even those who will not come to Italy from Germany, from France, from ’America, still know that Italy is the place where beauty has its highest triumph, and even better Italians, so they will be able to limit vacations to the sea, places to party in many groups, and go to museums and exhibitions.”

For Sgarbi, it is also possible “to recover in the final stage even exhibitions that were opened on the very days that everything was closed, and therefore were more closed than open, and hoping that everything can happen before the end of April, I ask that not only are funds not cut, and I ask everyone who reads me to share this appeal for culture, so that we can invest in museums and exhibitions for the next few months, until in the new year everything can be resumed earlier; and that among the first things to be opened, which have been senselessly closed, are museums, museums and exhibitions, and we do as we do with supermarkets, which are so fundamental to primary goods; and primary must also be knowledge, a primary good, primary must be literature, must be beauty, art.”

Sgarbi gives the example of supermarkets: just as access is restricted in places that are still open, so may access to museums be regulated. “You lose Easter as a great opportunity for movement and people will continue to stay indoors,” Sgarbi adds, “but, when they come out, I believe April 18, April 20 or April 25, it is not late to reopen museums, let it be said that they can come to see the halls. In each hall, no more than ten people, one meter apart, which is the only measure that seems objective and that seems to be shared in all the decrees that have been made, including the absurd ones that prevent people from taking a walk. And certainly it is much healthier to be outdoors than to be in a small apartment in five or six, one of whom may have fallen ill.” ù

Finally, Sgarbi concludes, “let it be established that, one meter away, you can start entering museums and exhibitions again, as soon as possible. I say it to Franceschini, I say it to everyone who can decide, to the government, not to the opposition evidently; but I don’t think I speak as opposition, I think I speak as the one who interprets a thought of many, that the closing of museums is a wound against culture. Let’s reopen them, let’s reopen them in limited numbers, with the utmost respect for safety regulations. And may we start again, in the name of Raphael, from Urbino.”

The appeal has already gained more than 200 supporters and has been signed by, among others, Mario de Simoni, Tiziano Panconi, Luca Salsi, Alessandra Moretti (Regie d’Author), Giulio Prosser, Andrea di Consoli, Pietro Carriglio, Angelo Crespi, Armando Siri, Carlo Vulpio, Marco Gulinelli, Augusto Agosta Tota, Franco Maria Ricci, Laura Casalis, Emanuele Ricucci, Antonello Sette, Pupi Avati, Nicola Porro, Pietro Folena, Fabrizio Moretti, Eugenio Riccomini, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Eric Ghysels, Bernardo Tortorici, Silvio Merlino, Mauro Paparo Filomarino, Masolino D’Amico, Ernesto Ferrero, Renato Barilli, Pierluigi Panza.

Sgarbi and other intellectuals to Conte: Let's reopen exhibitions and museums with restricted access, and get people outdoors

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