Staff shortage, and Lucca State Library faces permanent closure

The State Library of Lucca is in danger of closing indefinitely, as of April 1, 2021, due to lack of staff. This is what many local and national associations active in the field of preservation are denouncing. This is not a recent problem: At the State University of Lucca, where works of capital importance are preserved (such as the epistolary corpus of Giacomo Puccini, the Lucca edition of theEncyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, or even the Liber divinorum operum of Hildegard of Bingen, an illuminated codex from the 13th century), services had been cut for some time, at least since September 2019, when the staff, due to retirements and lack of turnover, had been reduced by half compared to the normal staffing plan (12 units as opposed to the planned 20-22). And by March 2020, it was even down to having only 9 staff.

Since then, denounces the Tuscan section of the association Mi Riconosci, nothing has happened to fix the situation or, at least, to lighten the burden of an increasingly less sustainable problem: indeed, things are getting worse, because if the Ministry of Cultural Heritage (on which the Library depends) does not do something, in April only three people will remain on the staff, including the director Monica Maria Angeli. And with only three people, closure is inevitable.

The episode, the associations denounce, takes on even more paradoxical contours after statements by Mayor Alessandro Tambellini, who admitted that he had not received any communication on the matter from the Ministry, but had instead learned the news from newspapers. The reaction of the SìAmoLucca advisory group and the community was immediate, while a petition is already online on the website of the association “Friends of the Machiavelli” and has already collected more than 5,000 signatures: it is addressed to MiBACT, the heads of local institutions and local parliamentarians to request that the ministry intervene by assigning staff units so that the closure is averted.

“The case of Lucca,” explains Vincenzo Sorrentino, art historian and spokesperson for the Mi Riconosci association, “is unfortunately the latest in a sad list of cultural places that, already in dramatic distress before the pandemic, after the lockdown found themselves in a similar situation for the same reasons. But the long-standing problem affects not only local libraries, but institutes of national importance such as the Biblioteca Centrale in Florence and the Braidense in Milan, as well as a great many archives and small museums. The risk, in these cases, is that instead of tackling the endemic staffing problem at its root, we resort to palliatives, even more damaging in the long run, such as outsourcing services or improperly employing volunteers, as in the case of the Guadagnucci Museum in Massa, which we have already covered in recent months.”

The activists call on the government for urgent measures that would foil the closure, which would cause immeasurable damage to the city, depriving it of a place not only for study and research, but also for meeting, caring for memory and local history, and preserving the rich heritage of works collected there. We also ask the ministry and the local government to avoid stopgap solutions that make use of free labor: the State Library, its users and Lucca in fact deserve attention and respect.

Mayor Tambellini, for his part, assured that he will work to ensure that MiBACT guarantees a solution. “I read with concern,” he said, “that this our primary institute of culture, custody, conservation and dissemination of extraordinary books and documents from April 1 will close due to lack of staff. Together with the councillor for culture Stefano Ragghianti to the councillor for the continuity of historical memory Ilaria Vietina, and other Lucchese administrators and parliamentarians, I will appeal to the Mibact for the closure to be avoided: libraries are the most important cultural garrison, leaving them closed means demobilizing a founding part of our republic in the territory.”

In the photo: the State Library of Lucca

Staff shortage, and Lucca State Library faces permanent closure

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