On the case of Trieste's museums. The real problem? The habits of the administrations

Those familiar with the administrative machinery that moves most of Italy’s civic museums will not have been seized with excesses of astonishment upon reading the news of the alleged abolition of the position of “director of the Trieste Civic Museums.” Meanwhile, because, from what we seem to understand from the press notes released by the city, the contours of the affair are much more blurred. Even if one disregards the past, reading the new organizational chart of the Municipality of Trieste one will realize that the museums have not been deprived of the director of reference: there has been, if anything, a reshuffling of responsibilities. Thus, if before there was a Museums and Libraries Service on which all of Trieste’s cultural venues depended, the new organizational chart introduces a split and two amalgamations: museums are separated from libraries, and the former are put into a single cauldron along with tourism and sports, while the latter are instead merged into education. At the same time, two new departments were created (“Tourism Promotion, Museums, Cultural and Sports Events” and “School, Education and Libraries”), which depend on the same department (“School, Education, Tourism Promotion, Cultural and Sports”) on which the “Museums and Libraries” department previously depended, but the museum management structures (i.e. Museum Administration, Historical and Art Museums, and Science Museums) have remained unchanged. The real novelty, in essence, is that if before there were two different managers in charge of museums on the one hand and tourism promotion on the other, now, for probable reasons of rationalization of expenses, the two matters will come under one person. This is obviously a highly questionable measure, but read in these terms it does not arouse the same outrage as when one reads that museums have been left without a director.

Besides, the news does not move one to astonishment by the fact that, if one wants to evaluate it diachronically, then it will be necessary to remember that the individual civic museums of Trieste had already been under a single director for some time. At least since 2017, as can be gleaned from reading an article from April of that year on the Trieste Musei website, i.e., in the aftermath of Laura Carlini’s appointment as director of the then newly formed Museums and Libraries Service. “The job that awaits Laura Carlini,” the piece read, “is definitely challenging and full of unknowns. She will have to direct a new entity, formed by the ensemble of all Trieste’s cultural institutions, each of which has historically had its own specialized director. In other times it would have been unthinkable to entrust a large library to the director of a museum, instead now it is not so uncommon (it happens all over Italy), to see everything unified under a single leader. This is also what the City of Trieste has done, and now the experiment of the single cultural package is starting. It must be said, however, without understatement, that this is a kind of institutional ’monster’ wanted by the administration essentially to cut managerial positions in the culture sector. In fact, until 2011 there were four managers, in 2012 there were three, in 2015 there were two, and now, precisely all the management of the enormous civic heritage is being concentrated in one figure, who will have to run about 20 museums (including a good portion in need of urgent work on both structures and organization and productivity) and a large library that has been suffering for years due to the loss of its historical headquarters.” In short: Trieste’s civic museums have been without directors for at least five years. Turning museums over to tourism promotion without altering management structures is hardly a bureaucratic jolt equal to what Trieste’s museums suffered in 2017.

There is, then, a third reason not to be surprised by what is happening in Trieste, namely the fact that the management model adopted for the Julian capital is raging in a large number of other Italian cities, where usually all museums report to a single manager and then have conservators, responsible officers, cultural instructors assigned to a wide variety of functions, and of course public, reception and surveillance officers. But they do not have a director. And, speaking of municipal sectors (without going into the scientific directorates: in the cities below, some museums have them, others do not), museums are often joined by libraries and archives, as is the case in La Spezia and Modena (in Liguria, one museum has a director and the others do not; in Modena, however, there is one), and sometimes tourism, as in Piacenza (where the sector manager is also the director of the civic museums) or in Monza (where there is no scientific director), where therefore the organization of the sector is not so dissimilar to that of Trieste, but it may happen that some of the directors to culture also deal with other things: in Prato (where there is a director), for example, the director of culture and tourism also has in charge of communication (thus urp, press office, internal communication, international relations, participatory processes), while in Viterbo he also deals with sports facilities. The competencies then stretch further in smaller municipalities. The problem, therefore, is not the distribution of competencies of municipal managers, but the absence of scientific directorates.

However, it is right that this should be mentioned in order to highlight a habit of many administrations that is far from good, and which does not meet the regulations of the Ministry of Culture or recommendations of ICOM, according to which each museum should have its own director in charge of the subject matter: instead, the opposite situation risks turning into the proverbial jackpot, whereby a director who perhaps has a sectoral background will be able to manage museums intelligently, to baste quality programming, to worry about having teaching that works, and so on, while instead a pure administrative person will risk being at the mercy of the alderman on duty. This is what happened, for example, in Carrara, where until 2019 (i.e., the year in which the regulations for the organization of the museum pole were approved with a view to obtaining regional relevance and the figures of the directors were introduced) the councillor for culture was de facto the director of the civic museums, with all the ups and downs of the case and with all the absence of continuity that such a situation necessarily entailed.

There are, it has been said, documents to refer to. The first is Icom’s Recommendation to Anci, Upi and Local Authorities on the Direction of Civic Museums, a text approved in Palermo in 2011, in which it already saw a trend that then (the case of Trieste demonstrated this five years ago) became even more widespread, namely the reduction and in some cases the disappearance of scientific directions. “The roles of scientific direction, a unique case in Europe,” the document reads, “are now almost always attributed to administrative managers to whom are also attributed all the competencies and responsibilities, including those exquisitely scientific and museological ones concerning research, teaching, study, the proposal of annual and multi-year programs of museum activities and more generally all the institutional functions and purposes of the museum defined by Art. 101 of Legislative Decree 42/2004 Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape.” Icom therefore, stressing the need for the presence of a “director who is fully responsible for the development and implementation of the cultural and scientific project of the museum itself,” recommends that administrations owning civic museums undertake “to request and verify as an unavoidable condition for access to theposition of director what is stipulated in the National Charter of Museum Professions,” that directors be fully responsible for the development and implementation of the museums’ cultural and scientific projects, as well as its overall management, and that the powers of administrative leadership not be extended to the governance of research, conservation and teaching.

Then there is the Icom Code of Ethics, which states in Article 1.12 that the museum director “constitutes a key function” and that when appointing him or her, “the responsible administrations are required to consider the knowledge and skills required for the function to be carried out effectively.” And finally, there is M.D. 113/2018, Adoption of Uniform Minimum Levels of Quality for Publicly Owned Museums and Places of Culture and Activation of the National Museum System, which introduced (confirming, and indeed corroborating, what was contained in M.D. May 10, 2001, Guideline Act on technical-scientific criteria and standards of operation and development of museums) among the minimum requirements of a museum is the “formal identification of the figure of director with specific professional competence and experience, possibly also shared with other institutions.” The requirement is precisely considered “minimum,” that is, an element without which the museum cannot register with the National Museum System .

The problem, then, lies not so much in the fact that Trieste’s civic museums no longer have directors: this has been the case for some years now. The real problem is that the recommendations of the bodies representing the museums and their interests are increasingly being disregarded by local governments and no care is taken to meet the minimum standards of ministerial regulations, with the result that museums fall down the priority ladder and find themselves having to work amidst financial constraints and lack of attention, or conversely they are treated as tourist attractions and therefore managed as such. This is a much more widespread problem than people think, and one on which attention should not be sporadic. Will this be reversed?

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