Alberto Bonisoli, first speech as minister: we need to spend more and we need to hire qualified people

At the 5 Star Movement’s big event, #MyVoteCount, which took place yesterday, Saturday, June 2, 2018, in Rome, Alberto Bonisoli also took the stage, so he spoke for the first time as minister of cultural heritage. The newly appointed minister laid out the guidelines that will characterize his term in office: more resources to be invested in culture, including hiring new staff, control of the ministry’s spending and economic flows, and listening to the needs of those working in the sector. Below is the full transcript of the minister’s speech.

"Italy is a fantastic country. I have traveled so much in the world, and I am happy, pleased and excited to be Italian, to live in this country. We have a fantastic artistic, cultural, landscape, historical heritage: it is unique and no one else has it. This heritage is an incredible resource, which everyone in the world envies us, and we have to treat it in the kindest, but at the same time the most effective way. Heritage is certainly something we need to know first of all-I am not sure, for example, that we know all the heritage we have. We have to start knowing it all the way down to the small villages, all the way down to the hamlets, to the historical realities: there are not only the big sites, there are also the others, they are on the same level and have the same dignity.

We have to enhance it, we have to protect it, we have to be watchdogs of our heritage, and we have to make it more usable. Heritage is beautiful but it also has to be experienced, it has to be known, starting from the school. For me this is a bet: we have to start doing this as soon as possible. There is no way that our kids don’t know fantastic things about the place where they live, maybe about something that is three kilometers from where they live and they discover it when they are forty years old.

What will be my goals and guidelines? The first: more resources, we need more money, we need to spend more, whether some gentlemen like it or not. Good: these gentlemen will get over it, we need to spend more. We are not spending enough, and that, just to be clear, means more jobs in the public. We have to hire, we don’t have to use temps within the cultural heritage, we have to invest in qualified, motivated and competent people who will do a fantastic job, like the one we deserve. The second thing: I want to understand, evaluate and possibly change the way the money is spent. By planning, and perhaps controlling how it is spent. This sounds like a trivial thing, I assure you it is not and will probably even be something revolutionary in some aspects. The third thing I am committed to doing is to listen to the needs of those who work in this area. To make laws, and then to drop them from the top, to push and maybe not mock, but to treat with extreme condescension those on whom a certain way of working is imposed, making it clear that it is not modern, it is not contemporary, it has not understood change...I’m sorry, that doesn’t work. If we want things to work, we have to call people, get them involved and have them work together with us. Those are the three things I would like to work on.

One last flash on tourism, because my ministry still has the competence for tourism, which will have an ad hoc ministry sooner or later. For the time being we will review taxation (it is badly needed), we need to invest in digitization, and lastly we need a minimum of a control room, because there is no way that Italy, when it goes to promote itself abroad, goes there with twenty different voices. Let’s go once and show how beautiful our country is."

Alberto Bonisoli, first speech as minister: we need to spend more and we need to hire qualified people

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