Museum White Paper, 1 billion visitors in 27 years

The attractiveness of Italy's state-owned museums is growing over time. From 1996 to 2023, they welcomed more than 1 billion visitors, 47% of whom were paying visitors, generating total revenues of about €4.4 billion. However, 85% of these results are mainly concentrated in 25 large venues with the first three - the Colosseum Archaeological Park, the Uffizi Galleries and the Archaeological Area of Pompeii - accounting for more than half of the total visitors and revenues. These are some of the main results indicated in the White Paper on Italian State Museums, born from a project by MondoMostre in collaboration with the Department of Business Economics of the University of Roma Tre, which collects the results of an unpublished research on the performance of Italian state museums in the period between 1996 and 2023. The operational basis of the research is the new database of Italian State Museums, developed by MondoMostre, which integrates in a single open-access platform data on visitors and takings from ticketing, customers and revenues from additional services, and concessionaires' royalties - published every year by the MiC Statistics Office - with the Istat historical series (2008-2024) on tourism and population.

The research shows how the Italian museum system is affected by a general positive trend, with a growth in visitors (+4.70 the average annual increase) and an increase in revenues over time, from 52.7 million euros produced in 1996 to more than 313 million euros in 2023. Ticketing revenues are also up, also due to the average annual increase in admission tickets, especially since 2015 with the advent of the management autonomy of the large complexes. On the other hand, smaller museums lag behind, recording annual ticketing revenues well below the economic sustainability threshold of a physical ticket office. As explained by Professor Laura di Pietro, editor of the volume together with her colleague Flaminia Musella during the presentation of the White Paper at MiC, of the approximately 4.4 billion in total revenues, 3.4 billion come from ticketing and 961 million from additional services (offered to visitors since 1998).

Narrowing the field, up to 2019 (the year before the pandemic) 924 million came from additional services with bookshops and pre-sales taking the lion's share, producing 65% of revenues. "These are services that are often entrusted to private operators," the economist noted, "and this limits the scope of revenues for the State, which only receives in its coffers the royalties paid by private operators, on average 13% of receipts. The venues that have been endowed with management and budgetary autonomy since 2014 include almost all the major attractions and account for most of the visitors and revenues of the Italian system. Analyses provided by the White Paper show how the acquisition of autonomy by some museums - such as, for example, the Archaeological Museum of Naples - has meant positive growth, in terms of visitor flows and ticketing revenues, and higher than the non-autonomous complexes.

"The project demonstrates that culture is a living heritage that grows with the participation of the entire community," noted Federico Mollicone, chairman of the Chamber's Culture Committee. And it is in this sense that the 'Italy on stage' reform (which has been given the green light by the Chamber of Deputies) is moving, which, he recalled, envisages the creation of a 'Digital registry of institutes, cultural venues and cultural assets belonging to the public', a tool whose objective is to organically map the country's cultural heritage to make it more accessible and exploitable.