Miniature 2025: Black and White Photography of Culture

The presentation of the Minicifre report, now in its third edition, was renewed in the Spadolini Hall of the Ministry of Culture. In the 2025 version, printed and online, data, statistics, graphs and tables converge at regional and national level to provide an almost complete and up-to-date picture of the cultural sector. The portal is a reliable source and a point of reference, so much so that it has seen an exponential increase in visits, which, between November 2024 and November 2025, amounted to more than 182,000.
The areas outlined in each chapter are eight and refer to: cultural heritage; libraries and archives; visual arts, contemporary architecture and design; publishing and the press; entertainment; training and employment in culture; economic resources; well-being, health and culture. The study also lends itself as a useful tool for analysing the social impacts of culture, in terms of both the quality and regeneration of territories and its contribution to the health and well-being of individuals and communities. It also represents the litmus test where the North-South divide and the gap between small and large attractors in terms of investment, consumption and visitor flows emerges terribly from the cold ocean of numbers. The sources of the report are diverse, drawing from MiC, Istat, Eurostat and SIAE data, etc., and refer mainly to the three-year period 2022 - 2024. Further effort should lead to aligning all the data by providing a constant and uniform update.

Analysing the data of the Museums, Monuments and Archaeological Areas: Admissions by Region (data for 2022), of the almost 108 million visitors recorded, about 36% are concentrated in Northern Italy, 44% in Central Italy, 13% in Southern Italy and 7% on the Islands. Looking at the 2024 figures of the top 10 state museums, visitors are concentrated mainly in the Colosseum Archaeological Park with almost 15 million admissions, followed by the Uffizi Gallery with 5 million admissions, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii and the Pantheon with 4 million admissions each. VIVE (Vittoriano and Palazzo Venezia) is a story in itself, which recorded a total of about 5 million visitors, between paying and non-paying visitors, with a strong numerical prevalence of the latter compared to the former.

The most visited exhibitions are concentrated in Venice, Rome, Milan and Trieste. In 2024 the Venice Biennale totalled almost 730,000 visitors, 'Munch. Il grido interiore' at the Palazzo Reale in Milan totalled around 280,000 visitors, the 'Van Gogh' exhibition at the Palazzo Revoltella in Trieste totalled 220,000 visitors, while in total the exhibitions at the Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome of two great artists such as Maurits Cornelis Escher and Fernando Botero scheduled between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2025 totalled around 460,000 visitors.
These rankings show that heritage-related flows are strongly concentrated in a few art cities and in the major attractions. In the absence of concrete cultural policies, the gap between attraction poles and smaller centres is bound to widen, with significant consequences: on the one hand, cities of art suffer from the increasing pressure of tourist overcrowding; on the other hand, lesser-known places face progressive impoverishment.

The numbers of libraries open to the public by region, with absolute values, (data from 2022), tell us that out of a total of 8,131, almost 57% are concentrated in Northern Italy, 16% in Central Italy and 27% in the South and Islands. While according to the latest available data dating back to 2022, the number of people who have used a service offered by the country's public and private library system at least once in a year was about 5.7 million; a figure that is up sharply compared to the previous two years, but still below the pre-pandemic levels of use (in 2019 it was over 7.6 million). However, this figure reflects territorial disparities, as compared to almost 4 million active users in Northern Italy, the South and the Islands achieve just under 1 million users, although Puglia stands out for levels of use above the national average. Grants to non-state libraries open to the public drop slightly: from 1.96 million euro in 2022 to 1.86 million euro in 2024.

 The mapping of contemporary venues by regional distribution updated to 14 April 2025 reveals a strong concentration in the regions of Northern and Central Italy (Lombardy 73, Piedmont 43, Veneto 27, Emilia Romagna 34, Tuscany 57, Lazio 84) compared to the other regions; Sicily with 27 cultural centres is the region with the most contemporary outposts in Southern Italy, followed by Campania with 23, Puglia and Calabria 16 each. The funds allocated to contemporary creation by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the MiC are growing. These include the Italian Council, the programme launched in 2017 with the aim of supporting, through the granting of funding, the production, knowledge and international dissemination of contemporary Italian creation in the field of visual arts. The fund increases from EUR 2 million in 2022 to EUR 2.6 million in 2024. While in the three-year period in question, the Plan for Contemporary Art increases from EUR 2.96 million to EUR 3.5 million.