All (or almost) against Calenda's proposal on museums. What insiders think about it

While waiting to receive from Carlo Calenda his comments, announced as early as last August 20 but not yet received at the moment, on the article with which our editor Federico Giannini commented on his proposal for the Capitoline Museums, today we take stock of the situation: what does the cultural heritage sector think about the mayoral candidate’s ideas for Rome? Summing up (the full proposal can be found on Calenda’s website), the Action leader has come up with a 4-step plan: “Move the offices of the municipality from the Capitol to create a single exhibition space where to concentrate the collections that make it possible to reconstruct the History of Rome, today fragmented in several scattered museums,” with the goal of making the Capitol the largest museum in Rome; “Create a true synergy between the Museum of Rome and the Archaeological Area of the Imperial Forums, making the entire Capitol a’single large museum area that presents a continuous and evocative narrative of the City’s history”; “Reorganize the internal exhibition route with the help of experts, to best accompany the visitor and reconstruct as faithfully as possible the historical periods and ages of Rome”; “Use the latest generation of multimedia.”

We collected the opinions of insiders (art historians, curators, critics, and journalists dealing with culture) who have come out, with signatures, in the national press. The opinions focused mainly on the idea of merging the Roman art collections of several museums (National Roman Museum, Museum of Rome, Museum of Civilization, Centrale Montemartini) at the Capitolini. We present them in order of how they came out.

Art historian Tomaso Montanari, in Il Fatto Quotidiano (Aug. 21), soundly rejected Calenda’s idea. “After a disappointing visit to the Capitoline Museums in which he didn’t understand a thing,” the scholar mockingly writes, “here’s the enlightenment: let’s merge them with the too-many (!) venues of the National Roman Museum and the Museum of Rome, and make one huge Roman history textbook [...]: like saying that to solve the problems of the Municipality’s budget, just print euros in the Capitol. Just like issuing paper money, however, you cannot do that: because history also has its own rules. It has a sense, a meaning, a depth: the collections of the citizens of Rome are different from that of the State [...], which are then other still from that left to the pope. They tell the same story, from different points of view: in an interweaving of voices that is precisely the richness of the Roman palimpsest, a polyphony unparalleled in the world.”

From the columns of Il Giornale (Aug. 22), Vittorio Sgarbi, who is supporting the center-right mayoral candidate, Enrico Michetti, in the elections and has declared himself to be ready to be his culture alderman in case of victory, criticizes those who have sided against Calenda (in order: Federico Giannini, Tomaso Montanari, Rita Borioni, Ilaria Miarelli Mariani, and Flaminia Gennari Santori, with the latter three expressing their views on the matter from their Facebook profiles), while not finding Calenda’s proposal plausible as it stands: indeed, he judges it “a timid proposal, which seems to neglect, by default, the link between ancient Rome and modern Rome, through the Renaissance, interpreted by Raphael, and the neoclassical age, witnessed by Antonio Canova.” For the art historian, however, Calenda’s proposal “needs to be read well, and interpreted, perhaps amended and straightened.” So here Sgarbi proposes to interpret it and share its spirit: “A single ticket must offer the keys to Rome, it must give the right, in one week, to open every door. It must be sold online, like and with hotel stays. Rome is a museum, miraculously articulated, not an accumulation of achievements like the Louvre. [...] All great ideas are achievable by capable and convinced men. Otherwise even the Louvre would not exist. I invite Michetti and Matone to support the idea, of Calenda and mine, of a great ancient and modern museum called, excavations, churches, museums, villas, palaces, ports: Rome. Rome’s museum” (Sgarbi a few days earlier had launched a proposal to establish a single ticket for all of Rome’s museums).

In the daily newspaper Domani (Aug. 23), critic Demetrio Paparoni believes, regarding Calenda’s proposal to clear the Palazzo Senatorio from City Hall and turn it into a museum, that “the proposal to allocate the spaces currently occupied by administrative offices for museum use is meritorious, because it it would make available to citizens places that the notoriously inefficient local political power, and certainly not since yesterday, has reserved for itself,” although, Paparoni writes, “more of a problem emerges instead from the proposal to gather in the Capitol area the great collections present in the city. This would entail, for example, the transfer of the section of the Pinacoteca Capitolina to Palazzo Barberini, triggering a series of conflicts between the city and state administrations. The competencies of the museums mentioned by Calenda are in fact distributed between state and city administration.” Again, “from the museographic point of view it is not clear how one can accommodate in a single space, however large this may be, an exhaustive collection of testimonies that is able to express the richness and complexity of Rome’s history.” According to Paparoni, it would also be “unrealistic as well as simplistic and ineffective” to put together in a single place the “plurality of Roman museums”: according to the critic, it is “the same Calenda does not believe feasible - at least not in the short term - his proposal, and that with his statement he wanted to throw a stone in the pigeonhole to raise, in the election campaign, a debate on an issue particularly felt in Rome.” On a positive note, he paid attention to the “educational role that the museum can play with an organization different from the usual museographic orientations.”

In the Corriere della Sera (Aug. 23), Andrea Carandini rejects the idea of merging the collections of ancient Roman art at the Capitol (Carandini calls it “an anti-historical project, which would dissolve the Capitoline and Conservatory Museums just as it aims to save the city’s lost history”, adding that “with collector’s materials, useful for the history of ancient art, one does not arrive at a museum of the sacred, political and private life of the urbe”), and acknowledges, however, that the Action candidate is right to have taken up “the idea of a museum of the history of Rome.” however, Carandini stresses, “it is no longer a matter of accumulating and recombining beautiful objects taken from other museums, but rather of making full use of information technology and multimedia, the only ones capable of resurrecting urban and rural landscapes of the past, with a few insertions of significant objects, taken mainly from the repositories.” Finally, Carandini supports the project of the center-left mayoral candidate, Roberto Gualtieri, who “Wants to resurrect the city museum next to the Circus Maximus (former pasta factory Pantanella), uniting it with that of Roman Civilization and equipping it with a center to update knowledge about Rome not by points but by ensembles: the discoveries are continuous but must be reassembled, possibly reconnecting Rome to the suburbs and Latium: fascinating and neglected.”

Harsh rejection also from Stefano Mentana in TPI - The Post International (Aug. 23), who starts from Centrale Montemartini saying that “moving the collection of this museum to any other place would take away any attractiveness to the public, and is one of the reasons why the proposal by Action leader as well as candidate for mayor of Rome, Carlo Calenda, to unite the collections of the capital’s archaeological museums in one place is short-sighted to say the least, however much the issue should not be considered taboo. And this is without getting into bureaucratic questions about the competencies between state and municipality, nor about the albeit important issue of the continuity of the collections.” Mentana does, however, acknowledge Calenda that his proposal has “grasped a theme, namely that the cradle of Roman civilization lacks a centralized state museum offer on the archaeology of ancient Rome,” and that it has “the merit of opening a debate on an issue too often kept in the corner.”

The only one who would seem to favor uniting the collections even physically is Francesco Bonami, who in Il Foglio (Aug. 23), called Calenda’s “a rational proposal” and wrote, “Putting under one hair [sic], at the Capitol, a group of the city’s collections now dislocated in various locations. Rationality with us always goes hand in hand with utopia. [...] Calenda is practical, I guess. He asks ’but who the hell today has the time and unfortunately also the desire to cram four different museums when he comes to Rome maybe for 48 hours?’ [...] An administrator and a mayor in particular must protect the cultural heritage of the city he is going to govern, but he must also protect the quality of time of his clients, citizens and temporary visitors. Not to do so is to hand over the permanent culture of a city to the impermanent, often simle to garbage, hit-and-run culture.”

All (or almost) against Calenda's proposal on museums. What insiders think about it

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