15/11/2011

Fallen leader leaves Italy's heritage in ruins

The Times, 15 November 2011
by Ben Macintyre

It was not just the economy that Berlusconi neglected but Pompeii, the Colosseum, Renaissance palaces . . .

As Silvio Berlusconi’s power dissolved, another ageing, badly restored monument crumbled in a different part of Italy: in the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii, a wall collapsed into rubble, a grimly fitting testament to Berlusconi’s cultural legacy. Berlusconi’s neglect of Italy’s architectural heritage may not have been his most notorious or colourful failing, but it was spectacular nonetheless. The embarrassments of the bunga-bunga years will pass, but the damage inflicted on his country’s ancient monuments is likely to be permanent.

Italy’s patrimony is cracked and peeling. The collapse of a stretch of wall near the Porta di Nola in Pompeii last month came just a year after the city’s House of Gladiators disintegrated, prompting a public outcry in Italy. Last year three slabs of mortar fell off the Colosseum just before the doors were opened to tourists, and the roof of Nero’s fabled Golden Palace caved in, wrecking a gilded ceiling and destroying a gallery beneath. Earlier this year, Italia Nostra, Italy’s national heritage association, urged Unesco to put Venice on its danger list to try to slow the city’s destruction from pollution, water and time.

Italy has no less than 45 World Heritage Sites, more than any other country, along with 450 museums. Some 45 million tourists flock to the country every year, providing 8.6 per cent of Italy’s GDP. But under Berlusconi, the budget for the Culture Ministry was cut year after year, dwindling to just 0.18 per cent of public spending. France, which boasts fewer heritage sites, spends 1 per cent of its budget on heritage preservation. Even Greece, in even worse financial straits than Italy, works harder on maintaining the fabric of its past.

Berlusconi halved Italy’s cultural budget over the past three years, but he did authorise one notable, headline-grabbing renovation. He ordered government restorers to reinstate the manhood on a damaged statue of the Roman god Mars, on loan to his official residence. The marble figure, carved in the 2nd century and mutilated some time later, was fitted with an artificial penis, attached with magnets, at a cost of £60,000. Berlusconi doubtless found this hilarious, but it was an entirely apt symbol for his years in power: extravagant, crude and cosmetic.

Lack of resources, weak government, poor management and corruption have left Italy’s ancient heritage and cultural monuments, like its economy, facing crisis. Pompeii alone has experienced some 15 archaeological emergencies since 2008, and needs an estimated £210 million to combat the effects of weather, light exposure, water damage, incompetent excavation, inadequate repair, tourism, vandalism, theft and official negligence.

Pompeii’s decline is only the most conspicuous evidence of a far wider problem. Across Italy, important buildings, large and small, are in danger: Norman churches in Sicily, industrial-era architecture in Turin, Bologna’s twin towers, Renaissance palaces in Florence, all are dilapidating at an alarming rate.

With Italy facing swingeing cuts and needing to refinance £170 billion of government debt, there is little hope of more state money for cultural preservation. Pompeii itself is waiting for a bailout, specifically the €105 million pledged by the EU. In the meantime a great city buried in AD79, rediscovered in 1749, restored and marvelled at for more than 300 years, is going through another, perhaps irreversible, cycle of destruction.

“Many disasters have befallen the world,” wrote Goethe on visiting Pompeii, “but few which have given posterity such delight.” The disaster now looming over Pompeii and other ancient sites is so acute, and their importance to world culture so enormous, that there are calls for international action, a World Art Fund that might be able to step in and stop the rot. The Venice in Peril Fund has successfully encouraged British donors to help to tackle an international cultural crisis, but whether that model could be applied on a wider scale seems doubtful, particularly in an atmosphere of gathering economic doom.

The buzzword in Italian cultural circles is valorizzazione, or “monetisation”, how to extract hard cash from archaeological artefacts without compromising their artistic, cultural and historical integrity.

One solution is under way at the Colosseum, once the scene for gladiatorial combat and now the setting for an almighty battle over how the heritage of Ancient Rome should be preserved and maintained. The great amphitheatre is in a poor state, grimed by car exhausts, shaken by a nearby underground line, and inadequately maintained.

Step up Diego Della Valle, the shoe tycoon who has agreed to spend some £22 million on a two-year project to restore the great Flavian Amphitheatre. The news that the billionaire owner of Tod’s shoes was investing in heritage has provoked horror among some of Italy’s cultural defenders, who predicted that the Colosseum will end up plastered with corporate logos, the image of the building used to sell shoes, handbags and perfume.

Della Valle insists he will receive no advertising or marketing advantages from the arrangement, but critics say such deals are the thin end of the wedge of cultural privatisation, in which Italy’s glorious past will be hijacked for inglorious commerce. Pompeii’s custodians are already seeking private donors to help to conserve for the coming decades what the ash preserved for centuries.

A report from the Italian Court of Auditors after the collapse of the House of Gladiators sharply criticised the Culture Ministry for the problems at Pompeii, but acknowledged that the cost of maintaining Italy’s cultural patrimony “far exceeds the available resources”. And that was before Italy was plunged into it current economic maelstrom.

A public-private partnership in cultural preservation may be the only way for cash-strapped Italy to maintain its heritage. Pompeii will not be sponsored by Pizza Hut or themed by Disney any time soon, but as Italy comes to terms with a raft of painful austerity measures it also faces a choice between preserving its cultural heritage through corporate sponsorship and private money, or watching it fall to pieces. Berlusconi tried to hold back age with facelift and hair transplant, but he allowed time to ravage the archaeological glories of his country’s past. He fiddled, while Rome decayed.