The helping hands of fashion and luxury is saving Italian monuments

 

After a long period during which the Italian government has been paying almost entirely the bill of the preservation of huge country’s cultural heritage – that is to say since the laws declared by the Minister of Education Giuseppe Bottai in 1939 – the scenery is apparently changing quickly these days, and the main players on the field are are from fashion and luxury.

 

The donation to the museum of Palazzo Pitti in Florence that Ms. Silvia Grassi Damiani, vice-president of Damiani spa, is going to announce next Monday – a precious collier Chakra prized in 2003 with the “Diamonds Trading Company Power of Love Award” – is only the last of a series of evidence proving the trend. A couple of months ago Ferruccio Ferragamo donated a conspicuous amount of money, around €600,000, for refurbishing eight rooms at the beginning of the third corridor of the Galleria degli Uffizi, in Florence. The works will start next February. The new display will include artworks by Ghirlandaio, Baldovinetti, Cosimo Rosselli, Filippino Lippi, Piero di Cosimo, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi e Luca Signorelli. In the meantime, in Rome, Bulgari is supporting support with €1.5m the restoration of the Spanish Steps at Trinità dei Monti (starting from 2015) and the Fendi is giving the €3m needed for the Trevi Fountain. Also the cleaning of the Colosseum, that soon will be free from the scaffolds that have partly covered it during the last years, has been made possible thanks to a €34m donation of a fashion brand, Tod’s.

 

It’s hard to say if this trend depends from the tax savings recently promoted by Italian Government – now the 65% of a donation is deductible in three years – or from a certain image of monuments and artworks recent movies such as “The great beauty” by Paolo Sorrentino or “The best offer” by Giuseppe Tornatore have given. Or if the last ruins at Pompei have finally touched the hearts of these companies. What can be said is that Italy, differently from US or France, is young with this kind of policy, and it would be recommendable to proceed very carefully for the aura of its cultural heritage is extraordinary delicate, and it is more similar to a software then to an hardware. Moreover, loving the past forgetting the present would be, again, a miserable error.

September 7, 2014