Italy will appoint new directors for five of the country’s most prestigious museums and cultural sites in high-profile selections that could help revive the fortunes of Alessandro Giuli, the culture minister, and indicate whether he plans to continue his predecessor’s nationalist agenda.
Posted on the culture ministry’s website on Tuesday, the openings are for the new directors of the Colosseum archaeological park, the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, the National Roman Museum, the Royal Palace of Turin, and the Galleria dell’Accademia and the National Museum of Bargello both in Florence (which have fallen under a single direction since last year). Citizens of Italy or other EU countries have until midday on 6 March to apply.
The appointments will be a chance for Giuli to put his stamp on the cultural agenda after months in which he has generated negative headlines, commentators claim. “He is an undecipherable personality but he could use this moment to search for a bit more visibility,” Massimiliano Rossi, a museology expert at the University of Salento, tells The Art Newspaper of the minister. “His mandate began with scandal… and he has an extremely low profile.”
Giuli, who was a member of the far-right youth organisation Fronte della Gioventù during his teens and is a long-term ally of the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, worked as a journalist before being appointed president of the foundation that runs Rome’s Maxxi museum of contemporary art in 2022. He took over as culture minister in September when his predecessor, Gennaro Sangiuliano, stepped down after becoming embroiled in a controversy over a consultancy job reportedly awarded to his former lover. Giuli was one of the few people without a degree to be selected for the government role.
He has generated intense media attention since then. In September, Francesco Spano, the Maxxi’s former general secretary, resigned just ten days after Giuli hired him as his ministerial chief of staff amid accusations of a conflict of interest. The following month, students accused a professor at Rome’s Sapienza University of conducting the final oral exam of Giuli’s philosophy degree behind closed doors. Last week, Giuli publicly clashed with Matteo Salvini, the minister for transport and infrastructure, over the latter’s proposal to limit powers of the superintendent’s office—part of the culture ministry—to block building works.
In a press note, the culture ministry said the job openings “represent a fundamental step toward renewing and strengthening our cultural heritage, with the goal of promoting innovation, enhancement and effective management of our museums, symbolic places of our historical and artistic identity”.
Officials have provided many clues about whether Giuli will continue Sangiuliano’s policy of favouring Italian candidates for top museum jobs, a reversal of a previous trend of selecting highly qualified experts from abroad. “The selection of new directors will be based on criteria of professionalism, international experience and the ability to promote culture in an inclusive and sustainable way,” the ministry’s note said.
Candidates will be shortlisted by a five-person selection committee drawn up by the ministry with the ministry’s museums department, which is led by the former Pompeii director Massimo Osanna, to then select its favoured applicants. Those appointed will be given an initial contract for four years that may be renewed once for a further four years.
