There is much discussion in Bergamo about the future of the Accademia Carrara

On Monday afternoon, May 9, the Bergamo City Council approved an amendment to the bylaws of the Accademia Carrara Foundation. The foundation, created in 2015 to manage the Accademia, a celebrated institution founded in 1781 by Giacomo Carrara and which became a civic museum in 1958, has the City of Bergamo as founder-promoter (the city’s mayor is also the foundation’s president). The amendment included the elimination of the “committee of guarantors,” whose duties will pass to the board of directors, and other minor changes such as the introduction of a “general manager” to work alongside the museum director. The debate in the courtroom was intense, with several critical comments from the opposition: by eliminating the committee of guarantors, in effect the board must control itself. So much so that Mayor Giorgio Gori commented, "I cannot understand why the minority, which in the past wanted the Foundation done exactly this way, in the days of Tentorio (former mayor, ed.), under private law, opening only later to the public part, now thinks differently. Before it was fine, now we complain." In fact, the absence of external control, for foundations with public participation created in the last 15 years, is the norm: the public participant is supposed to control what happens. So why has such a change raised the doubts of Bergamo’s center-right?

The reason is because local newspapers, about this change and the associated risks, real or alleged, have been talking. Not only that, local newspapers in Bergamo often talk about the administration of the Accademia Carrara Foundation. They have been talking about it since as early as 2016 (the foundation had been created a year earlier), and then more and more often in recent months, until these last days. Credit for this anomalous newspaper interest in matters of cultural administration should be given to a small group of citizens (or, as the newspapers call them, “exponents of the art and culture world”) who, after registering renovations, closures, and three consecutive redevelopments of the Accademia between 2016 and 2022, began organizing, writing to newspapers, and gathering support.

“We are a group of Bergamo citizens very concerned about the prospect of the third renovation of the Accademia Carrara in the space of only six years, including the closure period for Covid,” they wrote in December 2021. “The facts: in June 2008 the Carrara was closed and renovation work began. After 7 years of tormented construction, the Pinacoteca is reopened on April 23, 2015 (with the slogan: 100 more works!), only to be in recent times further rearranged and also stripped of 54 paintings sent to Shanghai with rather modest compensation. In 2021, a further renovation project is deliberated: after finding that it is impossible to bear the running costs, an expenditure of 700 thousand euros is planned for the interior rearrangement, plus 1.5 million euros for the exterior renovation and 590 thousand for the garden. The Project reduces the museum exhibition space to the second floor only, with 250 works on display instead of the current 500, leaving the second floor for rotating display of other works or possible temporary exhibitions.” They then went on to accuse of “supermarket” logic, or “mercantilism.” You can read the letter here. The signatories were well-known people in the city, so much so that both the mayor and the foundation’s management had to respond on the substance of the criticism, in the press.

The important data regarding this affair are two. The first is that the Academy, after spending on an “enlargement” renovation, is now spending on a “downsizing” renovation, after a very short time. A choice criticized by the writing committee but not by everyone. Andrea Rossetti on PrimaBergamo, for example, spoke of a realization, arguing that “as it was conceived, the ’new’ Carrara, the post-reopening one, does not stand up” and recalled that "when, on April 24, 2015, a big celebration was held for the reopening of the city’s first and most important museum, expectations were high. It was the year of the Expo in Milan and Bergamo was dreaming big. After all, after seven years of work, setbacks, political battles and skyrocketing costs (the initial estimate was 3.2 million euros, in the end about twelve million were shelled out), our city could finally present to the world the spearhead of its cultural offerings. Yet things didn’t quite go as hoped: Bergamo opened up to the world, becoming a tourist city in its own right, but the Academy never really took off." The second fact is that within a week, in December 2021, the 50 signatories of the letter, written by Diego Bonifaccio and Donatella Esposti, had become 108. Although the city majority has remained united behind the mayor, it is clear that something is moving, after 15 years of hiccuping openings.

So it’s on to 2022, with Bergamo (and Brescia) Italian Capital of Culture 2023 just around the corner: the 3.2 million invested, largely by the Lombardy region, to renovate the green areas and interior halls, will be joined by others until it reaches 7 million by 2023. Monday’s city council vote fits into this context. With another element: the donation of Mario Scaglia, one of the most important numismatic collections in the world, to the Foundation (and, mind you, not to the municipality), which will bind the Academy to display it, introducing a further change to the exhibition itinerary.

We will therefore have, says theEco di Bergamo, a Carrara Academy with less exhibition space, a renovated park (which will be named after PwC, a consulting firm and partner of the foundation, despite the fact that the money to renovate it is largely from the Region) with a bar/restaurant and a shop, which will be possible to walk through even without entering the museum, more space for temporary exhibitions (also related to Gamec’s move to the nearby Sports Hall), and more space for the history of past and, of course, contemporary donors.

As for governance, not much changes: the mayor remains the president, and the board of directors remains composed of a majority of representatives from private companies and entities (a very rare case in Italian publicly held cultural foundations): Quite simply, with the dissolution of the Board of Trustees (which, among other things, had the ability to dissolve the foundation), and the possibility for the Board to choose for itself the criteria by which one can become a partner in the foundation (and thus express a member of the Board itself) the actions of Carrara’s management will be less controlled. Something, in a way, in continuity with the intentions of the mayor-president who already in 2016 responded to the first criticisms by washing his hands of them (“is it possible that the 75 petitioners did not notice that the management of the Carrara was entrusted to a foundation composed of a majority of private individuals?”) and today assures, to justify the change in the statute, that “the public and private sides have never come into conflict and choices have always been made unanimously.” Which is curious, the two sides having different interests: the private partner has, rightly, the need to have an image or economic return from sponsorship, while the public side should ensure the best possible enjoyment for the citizenry.

But even this “unanimity” happens in many Italian public-private foundations at this historical stage. What happens less is a citizen debate regarding such choices. In Bergamo this debate is there, and it will continue: the committee organized a public assembly on June 10, inviting the Foundation’s management and the Administration.

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