Museums during coronavirus: essential public services...but off limits

Museums closed. This has never happened before for such a long and uncertain time. The measure established by the Prime Minister on March 9, among those aimed at containing the spread of COVID-19, invites reflection on what is also a record that Italy has been able to boast for a few years now: it is since 2015, in fact, that museums and places of culture have become essential public services guaranteed to citizens. Like hospitals, for instance. “Hospitals” off limits, however, in the hour of thehealth emergency.

The unprecedented lockout was arrived at by gradual but close measures due to the sudden aggravation of the situation. It started with the cancellation by the Minister of Cultural Heritage Dario Franceschini of the first free Sunday of the month on March 1, then with the Prime Minister’s Decree of March 8, which among the measures to counter and contain the spread of the epidemic (now pandemic) in the Lombardy region and in the provinces of some northern cities also established the closure of museums and cultural institutions. Just the next day the measure was extended to all of Italy, which had become a single “red zone.”

Although there was one region that imprudently at first acted independently. The adverb is not accidental. It was precisely autonomy that was waved by the Sicilian government in support of the decision taken against the grain of the national decision to leave cultural sites open, instead, on the island that first Sunday in March. Yet another evidence that made evident, once again, the distorted use of a generally disregarded Statute, which, it is worth recalling, in Art. 17, lett. n, r, states, “The Assembly [...] shall have exclusive legislation on [...] tourism, hotel supervision and landscape protection; conservation of antiquities and artistic works [...] museums, libraries and academies.” A specific competence the region enjoys in cultural heritage exhibited in alternating currents, most of the time misplaced. As in this case. But at the time, the message that was intended to be passed, to counteract the damage to the tourism sector, was along the lines of “let’s react, life must go on!” That is to say, it was not understood that the 17 million visitors brought to state museums since the introduction of the measure in 2014, as later shown also by the numbers recorded by the Sicilian sites, are not comparable to the ordinary entrance fees. A free admission that could well have been waived since it does not fulfill the basic needs of citizens, but it certainly encouraged the gathering of people, peculiar also for the queues that were created, as they always are on those special days with free admission, with tourists and visitors attached to each other.

Palermo’s Zisa, one of the museums that remained open. Ph. Credit

Sicilian museums are not yet equipped, like so many others along the Boot, but for some major museums, from the Pinacoteca di Brera to the Uffizi to the Vatican Museums, one can fall back for a virtual visit to the rooms with the masterpieces. The “segregation” of the original in some cases is alleviated by its digitization with such high definition that it allows one to observe details that the human eye could not reach de visu. It remains, however, that virtual fruition, which should always be complementary, integrative, and introductory to direct fruition, has ended up, instead, replacing it altogether the moment we are asked to give up the physical places of culture and the goods stored in them. Art precluded in its materiality, continues, however, to reach us with its contents and messages. Art, as an intangible good, remains open access!

But one thing is clear today: museums are not among the primary needs of citizens, even though they are essential public services. It is now that we can better grasp in its broader scope, which transcends the contingent fact that had prompted it, as well as in its limits, the regulatory reform introduced as a matter of urgency five years ago: bill No. 146/2015, converted with amendments into law No. 182 of November 12, 2015. Recall that the measure, which included in the category of essential public services also “the opening of museums and places of culture,” also subjecting strikes in the sector to the specific legislation on the subject (Law No. 146/1990), had been adopted as the government’s response to the closure to tourists of the Flavian amphitheater and the Imperial Forums for a union assembly. The measure served to ensure the continuity of the public service of “enjoyment of the historical and artistic heritage of the Nation,” as per the normative dictate.

Protection, enjoyment and enhancement of cultural heritage are all activities that have thus been included among the essential levels of services. An important achievement in the direction of a real democratization that assimilates the enjoyment of cultural heritage to public services aimed at ultimately promoting the well-being of the population.

But if even then Giuseppe Piperata in Aedon pointed out that the scope of the regulatory reform is not limited to the regulation of strikes, being "much broader, as it tends to further enhance the cultural heritage as an asset that must necessarily be enjoyed, so that it it can fulfill its function, which is to transmit evidences of civilization and foster the development of culture,“ the current scenario also reveals the limits of what is also a democratic achievement. In the lockout of museums, in the Republic’s inability to guarantee essential services such as their maximum enjoyment, or, with reference to the constitutional dictate, to remove the obstacles, which in this case are not ”of an economic and social order,“ but instead concern public health, that ”impede the full development of the human person“ (art. 3(2)) including through the enjoyment of cultural heritage, we can measure the full ”cultural" and social, and not just health or economic, gravity of the current emergency.

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