What was the really dark part of Giuli's speech.

No: the least clear part of the speech that Minister Alexander Giuli gave in the House last Oct. 8 to outline his policies was not the “somewhat more theoretical” introduction, it wasn’t that preamble about “defensive apocalypticism” and the “global infosphere,” it wasn’t that minute and a half that captured everyone’s attentions and obscured a full hour of the hearing. The meaning of that premise, though delivered to the audience on the wings of an eloquence not exactly familiar and everyday, was not so difficult to grasp if one had followed Giuli’s words carefully. The really obscure part, at least for those of us who deal with museums (and at least until now), was another, and it is useful to return to it a month later because, in the meantime, there has been no follow-up and clarification of what the minister said in the Sala del Mappamondo in Montecitorio.

We are referring, in this case, to the idea of introducing a “system of social redistribution of profits,” although it is not clear what profits are being talked about, since Giuli, in presenting this idea of his, moved in a constant back-and-forth between general and particular, starting from the overall figures of state museums’ income in 2023 (313.9 million euros), dwelling on theexample of the Pantheon, returning to talk less specifically about the “dialectic between gratuity and profit” (although perhaps he meant between gratuity and revenue), and again proposing the case of the Pantheon as a model of creating costs (where previously absent) that would enable new monetary flows to the ministry’s coffers. In the minister’s exact words, “The introduction of a ticket for entry to the Pantheon has led to a revenue for the public coffers of about 12 million euros in one year, without mortifying the flow of visitors and in fact creating a fund in favor of our cultural heritage. And here I would like to draw your attention to the need to overcome the dialectic between free and profit, because there has always been criticism of the decision to create costs for visitors to museums (or places that are much more than museums, such as the Pantheon), or even to raise the entrance fee for other places of culture. The central point is that in a system in which absolute gratuity, beyond the possibility that it would end up depreciating the quality of the offer, is in any case impossible from an objective point of view, because taxpayers’ money is sacred and gratuity would in any case generate chasms in the ministry’s accounts, it is not a matter of targeting profit for profit’s sake. The real point is to identify a system of social redistribution of profits there where we decide to create entrance fees, and I assure you that we will work on this, starting with the Pantheon and the allocation of the money, which is not a small amount, derived from the introduction of the ticket. We have to conceive of the revenue from culture as something that is redistributed with an identified destination upstream, almost as if it were a purpose tax.”

We would need, in essence, clarification on what is meant by “social redistribution of profits,” and we would need to understand whether it is intended to apply this “redistribution” to all state museums (as understood by many newspapers that have reported on the minister’s guidelines), or whether the initiative will concern only the Pantheon, or whether the minister is considering the idea of charging admission fees where admission is now free, and what might be the “social” destinations to which the minister intends to direct any surpluses from the administration of museums that find themselves generating profits at the end of the year. While waiting for Minister Giuli to outline his project in detail, a few considerations: first, the Pantheon represents a case in itself. That is to say, there is no other site in Italy, managed by the ministry, where a revenue stream even remotely comparable can be created out of nothing (not to mention, then, that the introduction of the Pantheon entrance fee came as a result of a process and discussion that has gone on for years). In other words, there is not a single site that can guarantee the ministry more than a million paying visitors created from one day to the next: the only two sites with more than a million visitors a year are the Capodimonte Park in Naples and the Miramare Park in Trieste, which are free precisely because they are public parks. But even if one were to create a cost for being able to access the Miramare Park (turning it, in essence, into the Julian counterpart of the Boboli Gardens), one would have to consider the spending propensity of Trieste residents and tourists, in the sense that it is unimaginable that 1.16 million non-paying visitors to the Miramare Park would become 1.16 million paying visitors overnight: to give you an idea, the Pantheon experienced, roughly, a halving of visitors after the introduction of ticketing.

Of course, a lot of revenue could be generated by introducing an entrance fee wherever it is not present now (and there is no shortage of such cases: the Andersen Museum in Rome, for example, has always been free, but became a fee-paying museum as of February 1 this year), but free admission is not an oversight of the ministry: if a museum is always free for everyone, it is usually because it is a site with special characteristics (many of the state cultural sites are nothing more than churches, for example), or it is because they are little-known sites, whose visit is also to be encouraged by means of free admission. It will then be necessary to consider that the sum of visitors to all cultural sites where you do not pay to enter does not add up to the total number of visitors to the Pantheon before the introduction of ticketing (in 2023, the free sites were visited by about 8.7 million visitors, compared to the 9.3 that the Pantheon recorded in 2019, the last pre-pandemic free year). It could obviously be a strategy to rake in, if we want to be particularly optimistic, between 15 and 25 million by extending paid admission to any place of state culture, but in the face of a substantial drop in visitors. So are we ready to give up a substantial number of citizens (let us not forget that free sites are often places with little tourist appeal ) no longer willing to attend a fundamental garrison of civilization in their territory because they are unwilling to pay to enter? The introduction of a ticket in all museums would indeed have this effect. It could, however, make sense only if the revenue were used for a truly opportune and healthy form of social redistribution, namely the extension of the categories of users entitled to free admission. Italy (and we have been saying this on these pages for years) is still one of the few Western countries where free, or at least discounted, admission is usually not granted to its unemployed citizens (at least in state museums this form of incentive is not provided). In our state museums there is no free admission in the last hours of opening, as is the case in many European museums (we still prefer the model of free Sundays on a monthly basis-a model to be overcome). The introduction of a special family ticket is not yet established in our museums. In our museums there are no plans, except in rare cases, to modulate ticket costs on a seasonal basis (the Uffizi are among the few museums that have a pricing policy that goes in this direction). The examples could go on.

As for profits, the reader who has been following us for a short time will be reminded that there is already an elementary redistribution mechanism in place (autonomous museums are obliged to donate 20 percent of their ticketing revenue to a fund managed by the Ministry that serves to finance their smaller, less visited, and therefore unable to sustain themselves “brothers”): in our recent survey of autonomous museums we commented on this mechanism with all the directors we interviewed. It should also be considered that not many museums close the year in surplus. And usually the profits are largely tied up to cover expenditure chapters on protection or enhancement projects or, simply, to run the museum (exhibitions, fittings, restoration work, investments in security, removal of architectural barriers, plant upgrades, renewal of contracts and much more). A recent example: the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino allocated half of its 2022 surplus to cover the costs of the Federico Barocci exhibition. Making a museum more attractive in the eyes of the public or investing in making it safer by committing profits could, after all, be considered forms of social redistribution.

The subject, in short, is vast and deserves further study and discussion. We agree that (and we have been saying this since unsuspected times) there is no dialectic between free admission and revenues, in the sense that the alternative to indiscriminate free admission is not the unsustainable tax to be paid everywhere: we imagine the museums of the future with tickets at modulable prices, capable of continuing to make the categories that are entitled to free admission benefit from it (indeed: even free admission could be better modulated, so as to bring more and more people to places of culture), and capable of investing their revenues and profits to make themselves more and more attractive to visitors, especially those who visit them infrequently.

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