Franceschini A to Z. Super review of what he did as minister, what to keep and what to throw away

Libraries and archives
Libraries and archives have been the real Cinderellas of the Franceschini ministry. They have produced very serious situations, which are still waiting to be resolved (funding for archives, Arianna Di Cori denounced in an article published in Repubblica in February 2018, had gone from 18 million in 2007 to 4 million in 2005, and staffing levels were halved). And the problems do not only concern peripheral libraries, but also the most important ones: the example of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, which in July 2018 (so just a month after Franceschini left the ministry) denounced that it was in danger of collapse because of staff cuts, can stand alone. At that date, the BNCF counted on 149 staff members out of a total of 185 expected to be on staff. And again, in 2016, the president of the Italian National Archival Association, pointed the finger at the “lack of funds to manage the daily, routine and even survival activities of these institutions” (the archives), starting, for example, with the State Archives in Rome, where there was also a lack of staff capable of dealing with ancient documents. On this front, however, there was also a positive aspect, namely the liberalization of digital reproductions of books and documents, a measure that students and scholars had been waiting for years.

Cinema
In 2016 Dario Franceschini increased funding for cinema but also introduced automatic funding tools criticized by many since they distributed a large part of the funding (about 70 percent) based on criteria determined by algorithms, while the remainder is allocated by commissions formed by ministerial officials. Franceschini had then introduced the Cinema2Day initiative, discounted admission to the cinema for only 2 euros, which was much appreciated but short-lived.

Directors
One of the most distinctive actions of the Dario Franceschini-branded MiBACT was the creation of the twenty autonomous museums (later raised to thirty), directed by personalities identified through international competition. Financial and managerial autonomy, thus added to scientific autonomy, revolutionized the structure of Italian museums, and of the past directors only one was confirmed at the time of the renewals (it was 2015 and the only director who kept his post after the Franceschini reform was Anna Coliva at the Galleria Borghese in Rome). In essence, the leadership class of museums was being completely renewed. The work of some was highly appreciated (Eike Schmidt, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Serena Bertolucci, Flaminia Gennari Santori), while much criticism was directed at other directors: for example to Peter Assmann, director of the Doge’s Palace in Mantua, who despite having worked with much more funds at his disposal than in the previous situation, has been accused of neglect (an article in Il Fatto Quotidiano in May 2017 launched harsh criticism against Assmann’s management), or to Cecilie Hollberg, criticized for not having solved the problems of queues at the Accademia Gallery and those related to the inconveniences resulting from the heat (the new air conditioning system will be installed soon, however), or again to James Bradburne who was criticized for the situation that arose following the breakdown of the air conditioning system in January 2017, or for the affair concerning the so-called Judith of Toulouse, a privately owned painting attributed to Caravaggio (Bradburne was accused of launching, through public museum, an operation that could have led to a sale on the market, which is why there was discontent in the scientific committee of the Pinacoteca di Brera, so much so that the historian Giovanni Agosti resigned). Of course, in each management there have been positive and negative aspects (in Brera almost all the rooms have been refurbished, for example, and interesting initiatives such as the Dialogues have been launched), but nevertheless almost all the directors have been able to count on resources and spaces of autonomy that their predecessors could only dream of: it is therefore natural that the positive aspects have prevailed.

Export
Franceschini is also remembered for the reform of the export of cultural goods, an affair that we here on Finestre Sull’Arte have been following for a long time and that has been criticized by many members of the cultural heritage world, but also welcomed by others. The reform, contained in the competition bill finally approved in August 2017, included the increase from 50 to 70 years of age of the threshold for the Superintendency’s evaluation for the purpose of granting the certificate of free circulation (works less than 70 years old do not therefore have to be screened by officials before being exported), the introduction of a threshold of 13.500 euros below which works can freely circulate upon self-certification (superintendencies can make spot checks), the introduction of a passport for works, lasting five years, to facilitate their exit and return from and to the national territory. Analysts were divided: critics hurled strides against the reform, accusing Franceschini of loosening the limits of protection and thus opening up the exit of important assets from Italy, while those in favor expressed appreciation for a reform that could have fostered the market for works of art.

Parties
Franceschini’s MiBACT administration is also remembered for the proliferation of private parties and events in museums (harsh criticism was directed, for example, at James Bradburne because of the incivility of guests at the “Brera Ball” who crowded the museum’s courtyard in 2017 leaving conspicuous signs of their presence, or again at Eike Schmidt, in 2016, when a private party was held at the Pitti Palace: the museum claimed it was a company dinner but some guests spoke of a bachelor party). Museum parties are organized to increase revenue, and few museums now give them up. Our magazine has always held a constant line on this issue: yes to private events in museums, as long as they do not inconvenience visitors (i.e., there are no closures on normal opening days to allow preparations or the holding of parties), are organized as far away from the works as possible, and guarantee lavish revenues for the museum. Unfortunately, in cases such as these, ideals must necessarily clash with a reality in which there are few resources available and museums must resort to all (lawful) means in order to grow them.

Tour guides
There is not exactly good blood between Dario Franceschini and tour guides. The height of the clash was reached in 2015, when the minister invited tour guides to “go to Slovenia” after Confesercenti Toscana organized a demonstration in Florence to ask the minister for guarantees on the specialization of guides. At the origin of the disagreements was a decree by Franceschini authorizing foreign guides (not licensed for Italy) to practice their profession in our country anyway: it was believed that doing so applied European rules on the movement of workers. But there were also other measures that turned the noses up at guides, who often criticized the minister, guilty in their view of promoting a deregulation of the profession. More generally, relations between Franceschini and cultural professionals have been very stormy. For a long time, the latter asked Franceschini for the decrees to establish the lists of cultural heritage professionals: they arrived only in May 2019, under Bonisoli’s ministry.

Home page
That is, websites, information technologies, innovative tools: under Franceschini, digitization has not moved forward at a very fast pace even if some improvements have indeed been there, and again driven by autonomous museums, which thanks to their financial autonomy have been able, almost everywhere, to renew their sites and digitize part of their collections. However, we are still far behind: in 2016, the Observatory for Digital Innovation in Cultural Heritage and Activities noted that, out of 476 Italian museums (among which non-state museums were also included, however), only 57 percent had a website and 52 percent had social accounts. However, Franceschini also went down in history for Verybello, the site that was supposed to collect the cultural events held in Italy during Expo 2015: costing 35,000 euros, criticized for its backwardness and substantial uselessness, it died after just two years of life.

Free admissions
Franceschini is the minister of free Sundays: it was under him that the measure was introduced that allowed everyone, without distinction, to enter a museum for free on the first Sunday of the month. A measure that was criticized by many (we at Finestre sull’Arte, for example, have always fought for free Sundays to be abolished and in their place the discount on tickets was revised), and then revisited by Minister Alberto Bonisoli with an intervention that was certainly an improvement, which maintained the winter free Sundays and cancelled the summer ones, concentrating the free days in a single week in March, a period of low attendance. An initiative, that of free museum week, actually appreciated by many museum directors. What’s more, Franceschini also canceled reductions for the over-65s, who are now required to pay full admission at state museums-a move that alienated the sympathies of a large plethora of retirees.

Labor
Labor is the main problem in cultural heritage. To work at full capacity without a hitch, the ministry would need 25,000 employees. Currently, the newly enacted Bonisoli reform provides for a staff of 188 managers and 18,976 workers. MiBAC expects thousands of retirements in three years from now, and one of the urgencies is to hold competitions as soon as possible to replenish the ministry’s forces. In this regard, Franceschini has done very little, limiting himself to the 2016 competition for 500 officials, which was insufficient even to cover retirements. Staffing gaps have produced unpleasant situations in almost all Italian museums: at the Galleria Nazionale in Parma, which was forced to close rooms, at the aforementioned Palazzo Ducale in Mantua (where the rooms of Isabella d’Este were often opened on the basis of staffing availability), at the Musei Nazionali in Lucca, and at the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola in Genoa (where there were long closures on holidays). In general, on opening hours many museums have had to contend with the unknowns of the moment. Even worse is going in the superintendencies, which have seen hemorrhages of officials moved to the museum poles. And the Bonisoli reform has not solved these problems.

Small museums
Small museums have been the big sticks in the Franceschini reform. Those that were lucky enough to fall under a museum pole dragged by a museum capable of bringing in visitors and revenue have held their own; the others, however, have been among the losers. This was for a simple reason: under non-autonomous museums, funds were more fairly and evenly distributed. Take the example of the solidarity fund (the one to which all Italian state museums contribute a share: the total is then allocated to the neediest museums): before the Franceschini reform, the solidarity fund required each museum to allocate a variable share, established after the fact and in any case not exceeding 30 percent of net ticket revenues, while the reform introduced 20 percent for everyone. However, a percentage that does not take into account the actual visitor gap (the thirty most visited museums in Italy draw 70 percent of visitors). In any case, the visitor gap between large and small museums has been steadily widening since the Franceschini reform, and this race has not yet stopped: the average number of visitors in the thirty most visited museums knows higher and higher growth rates year after year (because after all, it is on the large museums that the greatest efforts of the Franceschini reform have been concentrated), while the average number of visitors in the “small” museums has either decreased, or grown at a much milder pace.

Numbers
The numbers are those that at the end of each year Minister Franceschini would rattle off to demonstrate the successes of the ministry he led. However, in this magazine we have always subjected the numbers to thoughtful readings, demonstrating the growth of the gap between large and small museums mentioned in the previous point, and other situations. For example, the fact that the increase in visitors to museums is achieved mainly thanks to non-payers (probably those who stormed museums on free Sundays: in 2018 there was an increase of four and a half million free visitors against an increase of about 900 thousand paying visitors), the fact that the bulk of the increases are concentrated in a few museums (in the museums where you always get in for free, in 2018 88% of the increases were concentrated in only three museums), the receipts that have yes increased but mainly as a result of a rise in the average ticket price, which has never been as high as in recent years. In 2018, in particular, the historical record for the average ticket price increase was sealed: 9.19 euros (for the first time the 9-euro wall was broken through), a 14.12 percent increase over the previous year, the highest ever (who knows if the museum sector is the only one with double-digit inflation). After all, since free Sundays were instituted and many people wait for that day a month to visit state museums, additional resources had to be found: this was done by raising the prices of museum admission tickets almost everywhere.

Freebies
We are referring to 18-year-olds, who were kindly gifted five hundred euros to spend on cultural products and activities. “Eighteen-year-olds are a symbol,” Matteo Renzi declared in 2015, “I would like them to go to the theater. We give an educational message as a state, that exhibitions are a beautiful value. Let’s tell the kids that they are citizens and not just consumers.” So much for the 17- or 19-year-olds. It was an initiative that received (and continues to receive) great favor from the Italian Publishers Association, but it was also criticized by many because of its nature: a windfall contribution, for a very large number of activities (for example, even a Jovanotti concert falls under the events for which the voucher can be used), underspent compared to the planned allocations, and which also fueled a small “smuggling” market with some teenagers reselling their bonus.

Museum Poles
Franceschini’s reform has, for the first time in history, decoupled museums from the superintendencies: some 30 museums, as seen, have been granted managerial and financial autonomy, while the others have been regrouped on a regional basis and drained officials from the superintendencies. In the communiqué with which Franceschini announced the establishment of the poles, he explained that “the regional museum poles ensure on the territory the completion of the public service of fruition and enhancement of the institutes and places of culture in consignment to the State or to the State in any case entrusted to management, providing for the definition of common strategies and objectives of enhancement, in relation to the territorial area of competence, and promote the integration of cultural paths of fruition, as well as the consequent tourist-cultural itineraries.” However, policies capable of connecting museums to the territories have often been lacking, but not only: in a March 2017 note, Debora Tosato of the CGIL denounced the imbalance between the poles that can count on museums capable of exerting strong appeal on the public and those that do not have this strength (“the directors of the museum poles that cannot afford to count on the large numbers of tourist cities and therefore on the faculty of earning money from ticket revenues live in the anxiety of covering the ordinary expenses of maintenance and upkeep of the museums,” Tosato wrote. “In order to survive, some have therefore chosen to increase concessions of use to private individuals, increasingly delegating the cultural offer to events that have nothing to do with the scientific profile, history and collections of the museums. This means turning them into containers and not prioritizing investment in scientific activity and the authentic enhancement of cultural heritage.”)

Data quality
One of the main criticisms levelled at MiBAC is that it does not profile its audience thoroughly enough. Today we know that museums attract a certain number of people, but whose composition we do not know: we do not know who the audience is composed of, what the percentages of returning visitors to a museum are, what their aspirations are, what their critical issues are. Locally and privately, there are some interesting case histories of museums that have been able to profile audiences accurately and to define, thanks to the data collected, very high-performing cultural policies and marketing policies (a case we have discussed on these pages is that of the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara). The problem with the quality of audience data, however, goes beyond Franceschini: the Ferrara minister, to improve the situation, has simply done what those who preceded and followed him did. That is: nothing. And this is one of the main priorities that should guide the next government action: the better we know the public, the better we can improve the offer.

Revolution
“Revolution” has been the term Dario Franceschini has long used to refer to the MiBACT structure he introduced. And indeed the ministry has been revolutionized: autonomous museums, museum poles untied from superintendencies, single superintendencies, export reform. But the revolution has not touched many aspects: contemporary art and research, for example, two other topics touched very marginally by Franceschini’s reform. These, too, will have to be two aspects to which more attention should be paid.

Essential public services
One of the most controversial decisions of the Franceschini-branded ministry was the inclusion of museums in essential public services. This decision matured in September 2015, following a specific episode: a union meeting (obviously communicated in time and in compliance with the law) of the Colosseum workers, who had not been receiving allowances for overtime openings for about a year. Franceschini, to the cry of “the measure is full” (the workers’ guilt was in fact that of having kept the doors of the Colosseum and adjoining sites closed for three hours, from 8:30 to 11:30, and above all that of having called their assembly in a rather turbulent period for museum workers), that same day proposed, in the council of ministers, the inclusion of museums among essential public services, and so it was. That this was a measure aimed more at punishing workers by putting stakes in their right to strike than at making museums more efficient has always seemed evident to us from the fact that the situation of museum openings has not improved; on the contrary, many museums have been forced to temporarily close their doors due to staff shortages. “If culture were an essential public service,” pointed out Daniela Pietrangelo of the Mi Riconosci collective in May of this year, “we would not see thousands of Italian municipalities without libraries, inaccessible archives and closed museums across the country. The right to tourist visitation has been placed before the right to culture.”

Protection and Enhancement
On August 30, 2014, in triumphantly announcing the reform of MiBACT, Franceschini asserted that the reorganization made it possible to overcome “the ideological opposition between protection and valorization”: in fact, this opposition was precisely introduced by the reform, since previously the two actions fell under the competence of a single body, the superintendencies, which were also responsible for museums (in a very sensible view, since the vast majority of Italian museums were born with strong ties to its territory). The split that took place as a result of the Franceschini reform, with museums being untied from the superintendencies and gathered into the museum poles, in addition to sanctioning by decree the juxtaposition (since protection was put in charge of the superintendencies, and enhancement in charge of the autonomous museums and museum poles), has emptied, as many have denounced, the superintendencies, since several functionaries ended up working in the museum poles. This split has had rather drastic effects in some parts of Italy, think, for example, of the center of Italy hit by the 2016 earthquake: only a few days ago, on these pages, art historian and former mayor of Matelica, Alessandro Delpriori, denounced the fact that in the Marche region there are only two art historian functionaries in charge of the territory, because the others have moved to museums. And Delpriori called the effect of the reform on these areas “devastating.” This, too, will need some in-depth reflection.

Only
That is, the superintendencies as a result of the Franceschini reform: previously they were separated by competencies, while since 2015 architecture, arts, landscape, and archaeology have all been put under “holistic” superintendencies (as they were called at the time). The rationale of the measure was the simplification of relations between citizen and institution, but according to critics (for example, the academics of the Lincei, who in January 2019 signed a letter addressed to Minister Bonisoli precisely on the issue of single superintendencies), these measures have not allowed for optimal levels of efficiency in heritage protection and have generated confusion of roles. The contradictions arising from the bringing together of such different competencies under one office have been resolved by the Bonisoli reform (it was one of the most interesting measures of the decrees promoted by the Pentastelite minister): with the measures introduced by Bonisoli, the person in charge of authorizations, opinions, visas, and clearances will be the official responsible for the subject matter, called the area manager (ie: larcheologist will be in charge of archaeology, larchitect of the architectural heritage, art historian of the historical-artistic heritage), while the single superintendent introduced by the Franceschini reform, if he wants to issue a measure that deviates from the inquiries conducted by the area manager, will have to inform the General Directorate of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape.

Volunteering
Another great worry of Franceschini’s ministry has been the senseless use of volunteerism as a substitute for work, as we have repeatedly denounced on these pages. In this case, Franceschini has done nothing to improve the situation; on the contrary, if possible, he has fostered it: we recall in particular his words of appreciation for the FAI Days of Spring (made possible thanks to the extensive use of volunteers who accompany and guide visitors among the properties managed by the Italian Environmental Fund), defined by the then minister as “the demonstration of how public and private together can do a really important job of enhancing and protecting cultural heritage.” It goes without saying, of course, that protection and enhancement cannot and should not be based on the services of volunteers, but on the work of titled, qualified and paid professionals. Alberto Bonisoli has cracked down on these distortions and has always spoken out against the abuse of volunteerism, but the problem nonetheless persists and will be one of the main issues to be resolved soon.

Hush
With the ministerial decree of Dec. 23, 2015, containing the “Code of Conduct” for ministry employees, Franceschini’s MiBACT introduced an obligation for employees to inform their manager about their relations with the press. Specifically, Paragraph 8 of Article 3 states, “The employee - without prejudice to the right to express evaluations and disseminate information to protect the rights of trade unions and citizens - shall refrain from public, oral and written statements that are detrimental to the image and prestige of the Administration and shall inform the office manager of their relations with the press. Information activities are carried out through the spokesperson of the top political body of the Administration from the Press Office, communication activities through the Public Relations Office, as well as through any similar structures.” In fact, MiBAC officials, at the moment, first ask their managers for permission to speak to the press. This measure was officially created to prevent ministerial employees from making instrumental use of the press or harming the ministry’s image, but many observers have redefined the Dec. 23, 2015 dm as the “gag decree” (in that it would not allow MiBAC workers to express dissent against management: those directly affected by the measures would, in essence, be silenced, not least because in the circulars issued to notify employees of the ministry’s organs of the receipt of the dm, prior authorization from the press office or manager was clearly imposed before they could speak to the press), and they have been clamoring for its revocation (the latest, a few weeks ago, was Margherita Corrado of the M5S, but the list is not a short one).

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.

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