Is Eike Schmidt running for mayor of Florence?

WillEike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi, be the next mayor of Florence? For now, we do not even know if the hypothesis of a Schmidt candidate for mayor for the center-right is just a late summer boutade or if it is instead a viable path, the fact is that the director does not confirm or deny and already begins, the malicious would say, to speak like a politician, given the latest statements to the press: the Uffizi director in fact made some comments about the city in an interview with Corriere Fiorentino, not sparing broadsides to the current mayor Dario Nardella with whom, it is known, relations are far from idyllic.

“In these eight years of my stay in the city, unfortunately, Florence has changed and for the worse,” he told Mauro Bonciani, Roberto De Ponti and Chiara Dino. “It is dirtier and the security issue has worsened. I used to study at the State Archives and the Germanic Institute in the 1990s, and in the evenings you could walk quietly. Now we hear more and more about assaults on women and children.” On tourists, “there are a lot of them, of course,” Schmidt says, “but it all depends on how they are managed, how they are distributed. Let’s take the Uffizi, I would never say there are too many tourists, but precisely you have to know how to manage them. At ours in the morning, two or three hours pass before we reach the maximum number of admissions allowed, which is 900. The same applies to seasonality.” The director’s words were obviously not taken well at Palazzo Vecchio, so much so that Deputy Mayor Alessia Bettini felt the need to declare to the press, “The fact that a public official, director of a museum as prestigious as the Uffizi, expresses himself with the words we have read today makes us Florentines so sad, all the more so because they are used in a political key.”

At the end of 2023 Schmidt’s term as director of the Uffizi will end, and as is obvious, it is not yet known whether he will go on to direct another museum. Or if, as is increasingly rumored, a momentary move into politics is on the horizon. Of course, from Fratelli d’Italia, the party that is associated with Schmidt’s possible candidacy, there is no news or even openings leaking out, although the local press reports of a possible meeting in the coming days with Giovanni Donzelli, FdI’s lieutenant in Tuscany.

What is certain is only that Schmidt will acquire Italian citizenship in October. So, it is still too early to know whether Florence will have, for the first time, a director of the Uffizi as its first citizen.

Is Eike Schmidt running for mayor of Florence?

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