This is not the first time on these pages that we have dealt with the FAI days. Certainly a commendable initiative, since the Fondo Ambiente Italiano offers the possibility to visit, throughout Italy, sites that would otherwise be closed, or little or hardly accessible. What’s more, every year FAI invests considerable resources in the recovery and protection of many properties, thanks to the sums donated by citizens, so much so that the FAI days themselves are at the same time a sort of major collection event. The worthiness of the initiative, combined with a massive FAI media presence and underscored by the emphatic and triumphalist rhetoric with which it is usually accompanied in television reports or presentations in the generalist media, may, however, have generated the idea that the days are an appreciable event in all respects, and that any critical aspects may take a back seat in the face of the opportunity to see what is not normally allowed to be seen. At this point, after years in which the pattern of the Spring and Fall Days has remained essentially unchanged, one would have to wonder if the FAI model is still so commendable, so in step with the times, so exceptional.
The latest edition was held on Saturday, October 11 and Sunday, October 12, and more than 400,000 people participated, according to data released by FAI itself, who had the opportunity to take advantage of “free visits to 700 inaccessible or little-valued places in 350 cities throughout Italy,” according to the Fund’s website. The scheme of the Days, now in its 14th edition, is always the usual: FAI delegations and groups active in the area come to an agreement with the owners of the properties (mostly private, but there is no shortage of cases of public property) to allow the visits, entrusted to “young volunteers” who take care of both the logistical management of the visits and the guided tours, for which participants in the “Apprentice Tour Guides” initiative are often in charge, an educational project created in 1996 that involves 50 thousand high school students each year, who are given the task, we also read on the FAI website, of “accompanying the public to discover the heritage of history, art and nature of their territory and to feel directly involved in the social, cultural and economic life of the community, becoming an example for other young people in an educational exchange among peers.” This is where, of course, visits with professional guides or experts are not planned. In most cases, there is no reservation to participate in the visits: FAI days are almost everywhere run on a first-come, first-served basis, with the catch that, in case of a large turnout, admission is not guaranteed (the Fund itself specifies this in the FAQs on its website).
FAI, for some reason, has never changed this model one iota, although in recent years similar initiatives have sprung up around Italy (where “similar” means “opening of places that are usually not very accessible”: I’m thinking of Rolli Days in Genoa or Pontremoli Barocca) which, however, unlike the FAI days, have had the merit of experimenting, modifying in progress, and improving the starting situation. And above all, they have had the merit, at the turn of the first quarter of the third millennium, of demonstrating that the FAI model is no longer either the only one, the most efficient, or the most up-to-date. In the meantime, we can start with the chapter on volunteers, which is perhaps the most critical aspect of the FAI model, since, despite the fact that we speak of aninitiative that has gone through fourteen editions, so far the professions of culture do not seem to have been adequately valued, since the Fund has always preferred to entrust visits to volunteers trained for the occasion, with all the problems that follow: sloppy or hasty explanations if not erroneous with the consequent risk of misinformation (and if it goes well, discontinuous quality, varying from one boy to another: one can run into the true enthusiast who may have studied the subject in depth, or vice versa the one who did not know how to take the credits from the school-to-work alternation), oversimplifications, insecurity and poor ability to adapt in language according to the audience, questions from the audience, even simple ones, in front of which the boys are often bewildered. The argument opposed by FAI delegates, usually, is the preciousness of the educational experience for the youngsters who have the opportunity to start learning a trade in the field and, above all, become familiar with the monuments of their territory: more than fair observation, but I don’t think there is a single area of work where a trainee or, even worse, a haphazardly trained high school student is left alone with those who intend to use the service. All very well volunteering, splendid that sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year olds can get in touch with cultural heritage, but between “formative” volunteering, let’s call it that, and a form of volunteering in which the eighteen year old is given the task of leading a group of mostly inexperienced people, there is a gulf: it would be like the magazine I edit publishing the articles of an 18-year-old who has been offered just a few notions about the subject he intends to talk about. To offer the reader an example that is perhaps closer to him: no one who needs a defense in litigation or a cue for an investment would avoid using the services of a lawyer or a financial advisor to receive the same service from an 18-year-old who has received some notion from a volunteer. Of course: in real life, anyone could get free advice from a young person, an enthusiast, and then might decide to pay the professional to avail himself of his service. FAI Days, however, do not grant options except in limited cases, partly because most of the properties open only during the days and therefore no opportunity is given to visit them during the rest of the year.
It is a matter of objectives: if the purpose of the FAI Days is to raise public awareness and inform them that there is a heritage in our country that is often inaccessible, I think we can then dispense with guides with volunteers, and at most provide the public with audio guides or brochures prepared by experts or professionals with information on the open places. Conversely, if the goal is also, it says, to “promote among the citizenry, as wide as possible, the knowledge of the heritage [...] in order to promote its protection and enhancement with the contribution of all,” then it is not clear why cultural professionals should be kept on the sidelines: in the case, either we admit that culture professions are second-class professions, which we believe can be safely carried out by an 18-year-old boy who has received a smattering, or we have to recognize that perhaps the FAI model is not the most suitable for adequately valuing the professionalism of those who by trade are involved in culture. It is not denied that there are also shoddy professionals, but any field that involves public responsibility and technical knowledge should be entrusted to those with training, skills and professional recognition.
It is true that the Fund has repeatedly stated that it does not want to replace cultural professionals, but it will be necessary to point out that there are instances of similar initiatives that, in contrast to the Spring and Fall Days, have demonstrated this assumption concretely, with facts. During the days of Pontremoli Barocca, for example, visits are conducted by tour guides and art historians: to make the initiative sustainable, visitors are asked to pay a ticket (we are talking about figures that are certainly not exorbitant). It is true that FAI allows free visits to open places, although the volunteers, as is only fair, ask the public to donate a small sum to contribute to the cause: if then one intends to pursue the path of gratuitousness, the reference can be the Rolli Days in Genoa, where there is an entity that supports upstream the experts involved in the visits so that the public can avoid paying a ticket (despite, it must be said, there are still sites where one can enter only for a fee), and where, moreover, the public is given the option of making the visits with the popularizers (usually specialists or doctoral students in the humanities, who are paid by the City of Genoa for their work) or with professional guides.
Similarly, the way visits are managed now appears to be completely outdated. Scenes such as those that occurred at the Villa Pallavicino in Busseto (a municipal asset, by the way) during the last edition of the FAI Fall Days, with queues of more than forty minutes to enter and the public intending to visit the villa being turned away when there was more than than an hour before the official closing time due to overcrowding, are no longer acceptable for an event of such great appeal and with an experience of fourteen editions. These are the effects of the absence of reservations, which now seems inexplicable in the age of smartphones, apps, and artificial intelligence. Reservations have now been introduced in all similar events, from Rolli Days on down: it is a mode that, especially where entrances have to be restricted due to cramped or physiological limitations of the spaces, allows for a more judicious management of the public, who can show up when it is their turn without creating clutter, without creating crowds, and above all without being bounced by FAI volunteers, an eventuality that perhaps creates more frustration, especially if one goes to a place on purpose, than those two or three minutes required to complete a reservation on a website.
Of course: the FAI is a private entity and not a public body or a charity, and as a private entity it pursues its own interests and does so in the way it sees fit. And perhaps, as Isabella Ruggiero said on these pages a few years ago, “asking FAI to use paid guides instead of volunteers is like asking a penguin to live in the desert.” All the more so since FAI claims a broad satisfaction on the part of its public, which certainly no one wants to question: one can easily be happy to have spent a half-hour in line to visit a provincial prefecture that was explained to him by a high school senior from the classical high school, and that’s his problem. The point, however, is not the legal nature of the entity organizing the Days: the point is, meanwhile, that the entity in question is avowedly pursuing a mission that is of collective interest, manifest especially when it does not address itself to a user or customer base, but generically to “citizens”, called, moreover, in the words of FAI President Marco Magnifico, to offer “with their participation that indispensable strength” to continue to realize the opportunity “for knowledge and therefore growth” offered by the Fund. Secondly, the FAI model is constantly praised by our institutions: only last March, at the presentation of the Spring Days, Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli did not hesitate to state that “the men and women of the FAI are an integral part of that Republic entrusted with the protection and promotion of Italy’s cultural heritage” and to establish a parallel between the FAI and the Ministry of Culture itself, both of which were born in the same year. Third, as mentioned above, FAI also manages the openings of public property: during the last few days, to say, it was FAI that guaranteed the openings of places such as the Palazzo Comunale and the Palazzo dell’Agenzia delle Entrate in La Spezia, the Villa Pallavicino in Busseto, the Palazzo Massari in Ferrara, the Palazzo Comunale in Budrio, and so on, all places where visits were offered by FAI volunteers or apprentice ciceroni. If then FAI is to be considered a kind of garrison, albeit private, of the public institution, and if it is true that the very Republic of which the men and women of FAI are an integral part is founded on work, then perhaps, after fourteen editions, the time may have come to question the model on which the most celebrated event of the Fondo Ambiente Italiano has always been based and to ensure, especially in publicly owned property, high standards.
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