Italy’s museums brace for post-pandemic success

The age-old institutions are reinventing themselves with multimedia projects to connect with a global audience

Rome: Having suffered through the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, museums and galleries across Italy are now eager to lure new visitors.

Their efforts range from completing overdue renovations to installing new multimedia projects, all aimed at building a different, new relationship with local communities and visitors alike.

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A case in point is the prestigious Galleria Borghese in Rome, which has decided to include classical music concerts in its offer.

Renowned for its collection of sculptures, bas-reliefs, paintings and sculptures dating from the 15th-19th centuries, including by Baroque artist Caravaggio, the gallery last December launched a concert programme called “The Borghese and Music”, with artistes performing Baroque music in the museum’s luxuriously frescoed halls that was streamed online.

A similar initiative called “Art that Comforts” involves Italian actors reading poems inspired by some masterpieces hosted in the museum, which the public can enjoy through short video stories on the gallery’s website.

Francesca Cappelletti, director of Galleria Borghese since late 2020, said that an “open and inclusive” approach would help her institution as well as other cultural venues reach out to new and possibly younger audiences, and would enable them to more actively engage the public.

Other museums in Italy, such as the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and the Lombardy Region Museum Pole, which comprises 12 State museums surrounding Milan, which includes Milan’s Dominican Church and the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie hosting Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, have bet on initiatives to “scatter” their rich collections around their own region.

Across central Tuscany, therefore, the “Uffizi Diffusi” has set up different exhibitions in smaller cities and towns to enable people to discover new tourist destinations and enjoy the museum’s artworks while avoiding overcrowding at the ancient palaces of the historic Uffizi in Florence.

Lombardy museum complex director, Emanuela Daffra, said, “We launched a digital description of our most famous masterpiece, Leonardo’s Last Supper online, based on a very high-definition image that allows you to zoom in like with a microscope… Visitors can now enjoy details that the human eye could never before see,” Daffra said.