Sgarbi harsh: Uffizi scarred, green economy means mafia triumph, and Italian museums must have Italian directors

Decisive intervention by Vittorio Sgarbi this morning, Tuesday, July 24, 2018, at the hearing of the combined House and Senate Culture Committees, before the Minister of Cultural Heritage Alberto Bonisoli spoke: the words of the well-known critic and art historian will surely cause much discussion due to their very strong charge. Sgarbi, as a deputy elected from the ranks of Forza Italia, highlighted three main knots on which, according to him, the minister should intervene. The first is that of landscape. “The issue of landscape,” Sgarbi said, “has been totally underestimated since the beginning of the millennium by successive ministers. It is a theme addressed on an aesthetic level in an impeccable way by Cesare Brandi and Rossario Assunto, and we have in the South a landscape scarred, humiliated, attacked by the Mafia with a proliferation of photovoltaic and wind turbines on which there is no brake being placed to prevent sublime places from being erased forever from our memory. Sicily is hostage to it in a radical way, but Puglia, Calabria, Campania and Molise are overwhelmed by this falsified green economy violence that basically means the triumph of the Mafia with a complicit State. The real state-mafia pact is this: the state gives incentives for the mafia to destroy the landscape. If this fundamental problem is not posed at the beginning of a legislature, it will be useless to protect the artistic heritage, because never has such a radical upheaval been seen in the highest places of the beauty of the landscape.”

Instead, the second issue concerns the superintendencies and the Franceschini reform. “The desire on the part of many,” Sgarbi stressed, “is to compensate the Superintendencies by reestablishing criteria by sector, avoiding that there be an archaeologist who oversees an area where architecture and cultural heritage are together, after the Franceschini reform that instead of uniting only monumental or architectural heritage and artistic heritage also united archaeology, which is another world: it is the world of the dead, a world in which we need total autonomy of administration by a Superintendency keeping as well, like the Mixed Superintendencies, the connection between monuments and artistic heritage.”

Finally, harsh words about foreign directors on the strength of Italian museums, with the hope that the direction will be entrusted to Italian professionals. “The third point,” Sgarbi concluded, “is the appeal not of nationalism but of respect of the administration and its superintendents to Italian directorates. It makes no sense to pursue on a provincial level the call for often very modest foreign directors, who give very weak and poor signals of themselves. The Uffizi Gallery has been scarred with an intolerable set-up devoid of any respect for the masterpieces, which have been remounted with much boasting on the part of the director, who is also a fine person, but there is no foreign director who does not have an Italian whose merit is at least equal to his own, and therefore despite the fact that the Council of State wanted to pursue this useless reform by Franceschini, I recall the minister’s willingness to give, at least in the apex function, as in France, as in Germany, as in America, to the direction of the Superintendencies and museums, especially of the twenty that have been loosened from the Superintendency constraint, an Italian direction. I recall it as a necessity of respect for our officials.”

Pictured is Sgarbi during his speech this morning.

Sgarbi harsh: Uffizi scarred, green economy means mafia triumph, and Italian museums must have Italian directors

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