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The statistics are eloquent. Italy contains about 30,000 churches, 60,000 religious edifices, 200 state museums and many more regional and local museums. The number of works of art within them is beyond guessing—most collections remain uncatalogued—but the task of overseeing them falls to the Direzione Generale delle Antichita e Belle Arti, or Fine Arts Administration, an arm of the Ministry of Education that receives a mere 3% of the ministry's budget. The whole artistic heritage of Italy is supervised by 95 archaeologists, 92 art historians, 107 architects and 58 technicians. By comparison, New York's Metropolitan alone has a professional staff of 180.
The shortage of personnel is such that the Italian government cannot even keep the 75 acres of the Roman Forum fully opened. There is a staff of 40 custodians, but with holidays and sick leave it often happens that only four or five guards are left to patrol the whole area at the height of the tourist season. The superintendent of antiquities—who is in charge of the Forum, the Palatine, the Colosseum, and the Baths of Diocletian and Caracalla—has a diminutive annual budget of $350,000.
Five years ago, a parliamentary commission recommended that the staff of the Fine Arts Administration be tripled and its funds increased to $440 million per year, with an additional $2 billion spread over the next decade. This never happened, and the results have been tragic. Italian museum and church security is so poor that from 1968 to the middle of 1971 more than 3,000 works of art vanished. In the first three months of this year, 1,598 pieces were stolen, ranging from candlesticks to paintings by Titian. An estimated $10 million worth of archaeological material, from Etruscan vases to Roman busts, is spirited out of Italy every year.
At times the responsibilities of caring for the cities and their art get lost in a farcical tangle of bureaucratic procedure. A $400 million emergency fund for the restoration of Venice, raised abroad by Minister of Public Works Mario Ferrari Aggradi, lies unused while dozens of local and national agencies squabble over their slices of it. Another example: the frescoes by Cimabue, Giotto, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. Under the 1929 Concordat between Mussolini and the Holy See, the basilica and convent of Assisi were to be given back to the Vatican. But the Holy See refused to accept them unless the buildings and their irreplaceable frescoes were wholly restored. The Italian government agreed. After 43 years of delay, the final restoration funds have just been blocked by an Italian court. Its reason: Italian law does not allow expenditures for foreign states, and technically the two buildings are part of a foreign state, the Vatican, even though the Vatican has never taken them over. In the midst of this Byzantine absurdity, some of the greatest paintings in history are literally crumbling to dust.