McMaecenas and Fries

I have been meaning to post about this for ages. The howls over the appointment of Mario Resca in Italy to head a new ministry directorate to develop museums and ancient sites have been all over the international press. The difficulty is that Resca used to head up the fast-food chain McDonalds in Italy. I am not quite sure why this excludes him from anything, but Italy's cultural elite is up in arms:

“What’s at stake is the conservation and transmission of millenary values that one government must not be allowed to undersell or demolish,” said Marisa Dalai Emiliani, president of the Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli Association, a cultural research institute. On Monday the association organized a daylong seminar on the arts in Italy ominously titled “Cultural Heritage Emergency.”

That is from a piece in the New York Times.

While Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has comparatively little going for him, there is little doubt that Italy's heritage is often diastrously managed. Only the Economist seems to have some perspective on the issue:

Italy’s heritage is badly managed. Some of its museums are unwelcoming places with poor facilities. The most popular, the Uffizi in Florence, came only 21st in a 2007 world ranking, with just 1.6m visits. Yet attractions that are more popular are not necessarily well conserved. The ruins of Pompeii drew 2.6m visitors in 2007, but such is the dilapidation at the site that the government has declared a state of emergency.

The very name of Mr Resca’s new department emphasises valorizzazione, or value-adding. “What I would like to do is to leverage what we have and make the visitors’ experience better. We have to protect what we have, but we have to attract more people,” he says.

His use of words like “leverage” and his description of the country’s heritage as an “asset platform” are unlikely to endear him to critics. But they may take comfort from his enthusiasm for team-building and his reluctance to define a programme before taking the job. “I like to listen first,” he says.

Comments

[David]

At the risk of being glib, I think Italian preservationism could use a little dose of American influence. Perhaps it's because we have relatively little of it, but it seems to me (living near Philadelphia, the country's political cradle) that nearly anything in this area with even a tenuous historical association is placed under soft lighting behind plexiglass. No Big Macs allowed within 30 yards, please, thank you.

[adrianmurdoch]

It is a fair point. I have been frustrated at the knee-jerk "hamburger salesman so can't be in charge of culture" articles.