Let us start with an observation: in a country where there is a democratic system that is not yet on the road to authoritarian drifts (which I think Italy is) and where newspapers work, a minister can hardly claim nonexistent appropriations. Clearly, then, rhetoric often takes divergent paths from those of accounting (I believe, after all, that if it didn’t, politicians would change jobs and start being accountants), and if it is true that rhetoric is by definition the ’art of persuading with words, then those who are good at speaking can imply anything to their audience and will have no great difficulty disguising a small achievement in the clothes of the great achievement, the great feat that everyone was waiting for. The fact is, however, that even the most persuasive orator can convince his audience without needing to abstain from the truth, since rhetoric often has no need to invent facts: it is enough for it to adorn them with bows and sequins. But facts remain facts, even if they are garlanded.
Now, that there is a difference between accounting and rhetoric should be pointed out to writer Loredana Lipperini who, this weekend, set the cultural Facebook message boards ablaze with a post with thousands of likes and hundreds of shares, in which she declared that she could not understand how Culture Minister Alexander Giuli, at Pordenonelegge, could announce an investment of 54.8 million euros in favor of libraries and the Italian publishing industry when the Budget Law of 2025 paints a picture of substantial reductions for the Ministry of Culture. In his words, "Giuli spoke [...] about the 2025 investment ’of 54.8 million euros in favor of libraries and the Italian publishing supply chain,’ and here something does not add up. Because from what is foreseen in the 2025 budget law, sifted through in the special issue of the Feltrinelli Foundation’s newsletter Pubblico, the figures are other: 10 million euros less for library assets and book foundations, minus 9.4 for archival assets, minus 424.9 for cultural heritage, minus 485.8 for the protection of cultural and landscape assets and activities. Unless, fool that I am, Giuli meant all this as a witty quotation from Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle , where truths and worlds are different. Although I keep getting the feeling that I’ve ended up in the wrong one."
Let’s answer those who want to know right away if the accounts add up: yes, the accounts, unlike what Loredana Lipperini says, add up perfectly. Meanwhile, an assumption: the budget of a state does not work like the piggy bank at home, where if you put 100 euros and then two months later you need 100 euros you have to use the ones you take from the piggy bank. Without going too much into specifics, it could be said, limited to our case, that the state budget is based not only on money already in the till but also on projected revenues, and that the state budget is built on multiple spending chapters and missions, which can change even during the course of the year and after the Budget Law is passed. In short: while the budget at home has only one fund and every income and expenditure is usually immediate, the state budget is, we might say simplifying, the set of many partial budgets based on forecasts, political priorities, constraints and so on, which is why there is no contradiction in the statement of a minister adding an extra allocation for publishing and a Budget Law introducing decreases instead. And there is no wizardry, no sleight of hand: just go and look at the data, which are public and open to anyone who cares to do a little research.
Specifically: meanwhile, the way Lipperini presented the data in Feltrinelli’s newsletter (which then are nothing more than the numbers of the published Ministry Estimates established by the Budget Law), it almost seems as if the Ministry of Culture, for this year, will have to do without almost a billion euros (compared to 2024: Lipperini spoke of “minus 9.4,” “minus 424.9,” etc. without ever saying compared to what). In fact, that “minus 485.8 million euros” is the overall impact of the maneuver on Mission I of the Ministry of Culture (“Protection and Enhancement of Cultural and Landscape Heritage and Activities”) referring to the budget in current legislation, while the “minus 424.9” refers to Program 1.9 of mission I (“Programming and allocation of resources for the protection of cultural heritage”), and specifically to the difference between the resources allocated in the Budget Law of 2024 and those instead allocated in the following year’s maneuver (yes, I realize that it is all rather confusing, but one should address those who spur crowds on Facebook by writing ten-line posts with data out of context). They should not be mixed because they are two slightly different calculations, but let’s pretend, in order not to complicate things too much, that they both refer to the difference between the Budget Law of the year before and the Budget Law of the year after: the -424.9 should actually be considered part of the -485.8, and should not be added together. Let’s rewrite it in very basic terms: the mother tells her child that, for this week, his usual allowance of 20 euros will be reduced by 5 euros because he got a failing grade at school (yes, let’s pretend that union protections in the family do not exist), and as an additional punishment today he will not be able to buy ice cream, so 2 of those 5 euros less he will receive this week will affect the ice cream budget. So the child will score -5 euros in total and -2 for ice cream, but it is not that he will have 7 euros less: he will still have had 5 euros taken away.
Let’s go and complicate the accounts a little more: the reader will forgive me, but it is useful to understand how the Ministry of Culture’s allocations work. Those -485.8 million euros are not a single cut, but are the sum of two sections, a Section I of 132.2 and a Section II of 353.5 (that’s right: in total there is a 0.1 missing, but never mind rounding). Section I of the Budget Law is reserved for legislative innovations (establishment of funds that were not there before and are there now, cuts that were not there before and are there now, and so on), while Section II is reserved for refinancing, defunding, reshaping things that already existed instead. For the Ministry of Culture, the bulk of the reductions in Section I come from the spending review of ministries: to make a long story short, all ministries in the Republic are called upon to meet the programmatic public finance targets set out in the Structural Budget Plan, which prescribes a total of 2.7 billion in spending cuts for 2025, 2.6 for 2026, and 2.5 from 2027. These are cuts that affect all ministries, and for Culture they affect almost 150 million euros. Then, in the end, we get a -132.2 because the establishment of new funds mitigates the extent of the cuts: even, some ministries (Economy, Education, Defense, Agriculture, Health, Tourism) have Section I in the positive. As for Section II, on the other hand, these are remodulations: it will be worth noting that, in this case, the bulk of the decrease (171.6 million euros) stems from the defunding of the Implementation of the PNRR-MiC Complementary Plan (and, it will be remembered, PNRR resources are not infinite, and are tied to a very specific situation). The others are defundings that are hitting hard just about everywhere: the most substantial, after the one just mentioned, is that of the Cultural Heritage Protection Fund, which, in 2025, will receive 94.2 million euros less than what had been planned. In total, this expenditure chapter will be financed with about half a billion euros for the three-year period 2025-2027, a sum that will be used to cover 664 interventions for the restoration, expansion, recovery, and enhancement of museums, archaeological sites, and so on, against requests that reached the MiC that amounted to as much as 937 million euros. Those 94 million, in short, would not have solved much, if the demand corresponds to almost double the supply: perhaps, if we wanted to make ourselves more useful, instead of shouting at the cut without delving deeper, it would be more interesting to understand why, in the face of such high requests, the allocations amount to about half, by what logic some requests are admitted and others not, and so on.
Let us now come to those 54.8 million euros claimed by Giuli and which Lipperini, after reading that the Budget Law cuts by 10 million euros the funds for library assets and book foundations, cannot square in her calculation. Again, let’s go back a year: the Culture Decree, or Decree Law 201 of December 27, 2024, which was converted into law on February 21, 2025, in paragraph 2 of Article 3 established the establishment of a fund for publishing in the budget of the Ministry of Culture, with an allocation of 24.8 million euros for 2025 and 5.2 million euros for 2026. The fund will be used to enable public libraries to purchase books (so yes, it is an investment, and a smart one at that). The Culture Decree also stipulated the coverage, but let’s avoid overburdening the reader’s attention and patience and say, simplifying, that the Ministry found the resources to cover this expense. Expenditure that, a few weeks ago, was increased by 30 million euros. How could this be done? In June the government issued a decree law with urgent provisions for the financing of certain activities, in July the process of turning it into law began, and at this stage it was possible to amend it, as happens every time Parliament converts a decree law into law: an amendment was tabled proposing, precisely, a 30-million-euro increase in the fund to enable public libraries to purchase books, the text of the conversion bill was approved by the Senate on July 31 and by the House on August 6, and the increase became law, with the result that, yes, now the Ministry has a 54.8-million-euro fund for 2025 to purchase books.
What no one has said is that this 30 million is not that it will come from nowhere: to find this 30 million, the Ministry will go to reduce, we read in the text of the law, “the expenditure authorization referred to in Article 1, paragraph 357-bis, of Law No. 234 of December 30, 2021” (i.e., that year’s Budget Law). And what was it that authorized Paragraph 357-bis of Article 1 of the Budget Law four years ago? Surprise: bonuses for 18-year-olds! In a nutshell, for this year, and only for this year (at least for the time being, if no other decrees intervene), the Ministry will take 30 million euros initially allocated for the “Youth Culture Card” and the “Merit Card” and divert them to book purchases by public libraries. Those who have always opposed the 18-year-olds’ bonus will be delighted; those who thought it was a crucial measure will be appalled, horrified, outraged.
Of course, all of the above cannot be noticed if one carefully avoids moving between a Budget Law and a Culture Decree, between a conversion law and a report of the Senate Budget Committee, and if one believes that to oppose a minister it is a very good idea to rely on four data read in a newsletter without delving into them and quoting them out of context. My deeply vintage and profoundly naive soul leads me to believe that the minimum standard for anyone who wants to challenge a number is to analyze, to “sift through” the data himself. Otherwise, better to leave it alone. Of course, I realize that on Facebook it is more difficult to present an analysis (even a minimal one, like the one above) to the public than to garner support by throwing some random data out there to prove that the government is cutting back on culture and that therefore the allocations presented by Giuli do not add up, but the fact is that such opposition is not very useful and I do not think it is even serious, on the contrary: it is probably even counterproductive.
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