Schmidt: "at the Uffizi many young people thanks to Chiara Ferragni. The real restart will be in 2022"

According to the director of the Uffizi, Eike D. Schmidt, influencer Chiara Ferragni ’s July 17, 2020 visit to the museum had an effect on the numbers, and it would be the numbers that would give the confirmation (already the week after Schmidt had talked about a +24%, but now there seem to be more solid numbers). The same is true for another influencer visit, that of Martina Socrates, who is less well known than Chiara Ferragni but very popular on TikTok, especially among a very young audience: twenty-two years old, the girl has a very followed channel on the Chinese social network, where she has more than a million followers. Schmidt spoke about this and other issues in an interview with the new president of the Foreign Press Association in Italy, Maarten van Aalderen.

“The analysis of the numbers confirms this for us,” Schmidt says. “For visitors under 25, there was a stable growth between the end of June and the third week of August. This is a growth that is particularly true for the 19-25 bracket. So the effect that could be called ’Socrates-Ferragni’ (for the visits to the Gallery by Martina Socrates on June 12 and Chiara Ferragni on July 17) is solidly supported by the numbers, which reveal that these were not isolated or episodic phenomena, but a lasting and wide-ranging development, thanks to a precise and systematic approach strategy aimed at young people. The increased engagement of youth audiences can be understood through the analysis of percentages, from which we note a stable fruition of the under-19s throughout the summer despite the lack of school trips, and a singular growth in the 19-25 bracket from the beginning of June to the end of July, followed by a relative stabilization that lasted until October. In 2020 for the first time, the presence of visitors under 25 at the Uffizi Gallery was more than a third of the total (34.6 percent). This equates to a growth in the bracket of +24.9 percent over the previous year. For the 19-25 bracket, there was a sharp jump from 6.1 percent (2019) to 14.3 percent (2020): a growth of +134.4 percent over the previous year. The peak was reached in the two weeks after July 17, the date of Chiara Ferragni’s visit to the Uffizi.”

Chiara Ferragni’s visit had raised a noisy hornet’s nest of controversy (almost always with the usual argument, albeit with different nuances: resorting to the figure of Chiara Ferragni would be for the museum a sort of abdication of its fictions), so much so that Schmidt himself had intervened, defending his and his museum’s work, and accusing the polemicists of "puzzalnasism."

Schmidt then spoke about the Uffizi Diffusi project: “The strategy of the Uffizi Diffusi,” he said, “could also serve as a model for other cities of art and for other territories: more easily, in regions such as Lombardy, or Emilia Romagna, more difficult in the Veneto, because of the very different characteristics between Venice and the mainland. As for the Uffizi Diffusi, the first initiatives starting, already in the coming weeks, will concern small realities and will be in this initial phase mostly temporary exhibitions; however, the idea is to transform all this into a stable network, to the point of having a part of our website specifically dedicated to Tuscan museums and to the Uffizi Diffusi initiatives. It will be a big operation in fieri: gradually, every year, new initiatives, small and large, will be added.” And it may land abroad as well: “More than the opening of branch offices in other continents, we are organizing and taking exhibitions abroad, also aimed at arousing interest not only for the Uffizi itself, but for Tuscany and Italy. Every visitor to a Uffizi exhibition somewhere in the world becomes a potential future visitor to the Galleries and as such will also contribute to the regional and national economy. Regarding the maxi projects of ’global relocations’ of other museums in the long term we will only be able to say in many years whether the benefits were greater than the costs, and whether they were so only for the territory of destination or also for the territory of origin.”

Then there is the bad news. Starting with the 2020 numbers, which nevertheless, despite the drastic drop, make the Uffizi climb a few places in the rankings of the world’s most visited museums because of the prolonged closures in other countries. “The pandemic hit was very strong,” Schmidt says, “but the Uffizi Galleries are holding up: in 2020 we had a total of 1.206,175 visitors (Uffizi: 659,043; Palazzo Pitti: 198,270; Boboli Gardens 348,862), up 27.5 percent from the previous year, despite Covid and all that it entailed in terms of closures and restrictions. This ranks us seventh among art museums worldwide (in 2019 we were ranked ninth). We lost 72 percent of visitors, a percentage identical to the Louvre in Paris and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Overall, we realized revenues of 8.8 million euros, which exactly reflected the percentage of visitor decline. In 2019, receipts had been 34 million euros. However, in 2020 we also saw very positive developments: the city and regional populations reacquainted themselves with our museums, both in attendance and through digital media. We also saw an increase like never before in visits and interactions with the Uffizi by young people up to age 25.”

The real restart, according to the director of the Uffizi, will only occur in 2022: “For the museums, we don’t expect the real restart until next year. From 2022 we expect a return to the high demand that there was before the pandemic. Operationally, as Uffizi by the beginning of May we will be ready to reopen: we have 15 new rooms dedicated to 16th-century Florentine and Roman painting that will be opened on the same day that the museum returns to welcoming the public. What we are hoping for, what we are strongly hoping for, is a stable reopening. And we also have the hope that we will be able to avoid new closures next winter, although it is too early now to venture any assumptions in this area.”

Schmidt: "at the Uffizi many young people thanks to Chiara Ferragni. The real restart will be in 2022"

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