Museums in 2023 set records for visitors and revenue: what's behind the numbers

With the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic behind them, Italy’s state museums are returning to the numbers of the past: and with the usual emphasis, the Ministry of Culture in recent days released figures for 2023, the first year of full operation after the pandemic’s reverses, and the ministerial notes have been very insistent on the records that were set last year. It’s true: never have state museums recorded so many visitors (over 57 million, 57,730,502 to be exact) and so many receipts (surpassed the 300 million euro ceiling for the first time: museums totaled gross receipts of 313,888,163.71 euros). What trends can be gleaned upon a deeper analysis of the data?

First of all, a relevant premise is needed: this year’s data show significant fluctuations from the past mainly due to two significant effects. The first is the introduction of paid admission to the Pantheon, which alone displaces millions of visitors and has seen ticketing begin on July 1, 2023. Compared to 2018 and 2019, therefore, there will be a drastic decline in visitors to the free sites, which can be attributed to the fact that the Pantheon has passed among the fee-paying institutions. The second is the singular method of calculating visitors to the Roman Forum: in fact, a note on the side of the tables states that, as of January 2022, “the data on free visitors to the Colosseum Archaeological Park also take into account the returns to the archaeological area ’Roman Forum-Palatine’ connected to the ticket ’Colosseum-Roman Forum Palatine Circuit.’” That is why, going to look at the single figure for the Roman Forum, it turns out in the last two years ahuge disproportion between paying visitors (335,329 in 2023) and non-paying visitors (4,881,607 in 2023) compared to, for example, 2019 (when paying visitors were 114.857 and non-payers 42,276): those who buy a cumulative ticket and visit the Colosseum first and then, later, the Roman Forum and Palatine are included in the tally of free visitors. And this also explains the big difference in free visitors to the paid sites between 2023 and previous years: more than 18 million this year versus a high of 11.8 in the pre-Covid period. There is, however, a need to take into account that before 2023 the figures for free institutes were conditioned by the presence of the Pantheon, which in 2019 exceeded 9 million visitors: this year, on the contrary, the introduction of the ticket must have disincentivized many visitors, if it went to a total of about 5 million (of which 3.9 were free). In short, the differences in calculation methods and the introduction of the ticket to the Pantheon, because they displace very significant numbers of visitors, make a comparison difficult: the only way to have a comparison is to attempt an exercise, that is, to remove from the calculation the visitors to the Colosseum and Pantheon, which were also the two most visited sites in both 2023 and 2019. A kind of calculation starting with the third most visited museum, in short: the 2023 record would still stand, since, taking out Colosseum and Pantheon, last year’s Italian museums exceeded 40 million visitors, compared with nearly 37.9 million in 2019 and 38.7 in 2018. To have cleaner visitor data, therefore, the numbers without Colosseum and Pantheon will be taken into account.

The numbers of autonomous museums that already had autonomy in 2019 increased slightly in 2023: again without the Colosseum, they were 23.34 million last year compared to 21.69 in previous years. Then the imbalance between the most visited museums and all the others grows: again taking out the Colosseum and Pantheon, the top of the list in 2023 weighed 24.3 million out of a total of 40.3 (60.2 percent of visitors are thus concentrated on 28 sites), while for 2019 the figure was 22.2 out of 37.9 (58.5 percent) and for 2019 it was 20.3 out of 38.7 (52.45 percent). Thus, the average number of visitors to major sites has always been increasing, but the average number of “minor” sites, so to speak, has still increased this year due to the smaller number of museums considered in the calculation (454 this year vs. 479 in 2019 and 488 in 2018): 37.623 visitors per site versus 34,929 in 2019, 40,009 in 2018, 33,441 in 2017, 30,081 in 2016, and 30,887 in 2015.

On revenues, it can definitely be said that the record of more than 313 million euros is due to a general increase in museum entrance fees , which have never been as expensive on average as last year: the average ticket cost, obtained by dividing the total revenue by the number of payers, is 11.37 euros, the highest ever, up 7.6 percent from 2022, when another all-time record was set (10.56, average over 10 euros for the first time), which in turn is 13.36 percent higher than the 9.3 euros average in 2021. Since 2019, museum tickets have been registering heavier and heavier price increases, and if before the increase in the average cost was roughly in line with inflation, after the Franceschini reform prices have often experienced decidedly large increases (the record was reached between 2019 and 2018 with year-on-year average increase of more than 14 percent). The tables do not specify whether the revenues take into account the euro surcharge, established from June 15, 2023, to December 15, to deal with the Emilia Romagna flood emergency last year: in any case, never in history had museums earned the ministry’s coffers more than 70 million euros more than the previous year (the record, in this case, always dated back to 2019, with an increase in revenue about 34 million: a figure that was doubled).

It should be emphasized that the figure is not necessarily negative: it is true that ticket prices are rising, but there has not been a contraction in the paying public either (far from it, and it also applies to many of the museums where people pay more to enter: for example, the Uffizi, where a single-visit ticket costs 25 euros, compared to 2019 experienced an increase of 200,000 visitors from 1.6 million in 2019 to 1.8 million in 2023). This means that Italian museums are frequented by a public that is still willing to pay an increasing price to visit them: it would certainly be interesting to understand how spending is distributed in order to get an idea of which audiences are most likely to spend (predictably that of international tourists), and consequently what initiatives to take to balance the financial sustainability needs of museums (unthinkable is theintroduction of indiscriminate free admission) with the need to bring more audiences to the halls of the institutions, especially thinking about the audience of residents or those who cannot afford to spend 10-15-20 euros to visit a museum (categories for which it would instead make sense to assume free admission). At the moment, however, there is no aggregate data that would allow this examination.

At the same time as presenting data on visitors and revenue, Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano also unveiled the “Italian Museums” app: the hope of insiders is that finally, with the tracking of users who purchase museum tickets through the app, more refined data will be available to perform more accurate analyses. It would already be so much to have even just the age and origin of visitors to get more information on flows and trends: the hope is that in the future the ministry will be able to work in this direction, to give those who have to do analysis more and better detailed numbers.

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