ROME — The most enduring images of this city after
cataclysm were printed a little over 250 years ago, by the artist Giovanni
Battista Piranesi. His “Ruins of Rome” etchings depict landmarks like the
Pantheon and the Castel Sant’Angelo, but its most famous images show
rubble-strewn gardens and crumbling bridges, and tricorn-hatted gentlemen
wandering through collapsed temples and overgrown ossuaries. For 18th-century
philosophers and noblemen on the Grand Tour, the dramas of “Ruins of Rome” made
a point about the transience of civilization — but they were, even more than
that, a high-end tourist guide. The good days are over, but come anyway; Rome’s
cooler with no people.
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Recently, I have had my own Piranesian views of the empty
Eternal City: on Instagram, mostly, as
Rome and other European capitals have
reopened their museums and heritage sites (and, in some cases, their
performance venues) to limited crowds.
Locals have come back, in spurts.
Tourists are returning, in trickles. But usually thronged cultural institutions
are nowhere near pre-pandemic attendance levels — and, like Piranesi’s isolated
Grand Tourists in the empty Forum, I thought I would better see the rubble for
myself.
At the Palazzo Barberini, home to Italy’s national old
masters collection, I was the only visitor to newly opened galleries hosting a
large show of Baroque painting and clock making. In well over half the rooms of
the Capitoline Museums, on the hillside piazza designed by Michelangelo, it was
just me and the marble busts. Raphael’s chapel at Santa Maria del Popolo,
Caravaggio’s spotlit “Calling of St. Matthew” in San Luigi dei Francesi, the
late-medieval mosaics of Santa Maria in Trastevere: all mine.
Devoid of most visitors, Rome is the world’s greatest
cultural stimulus package. But these museums and art institutions lost
three-quarters of their public during the pandemic year. Even as vaccinations
wax and travel restrictions wane, Roman and other European museums — some of
which became almost divorced from local audiences as mass tourism peaked in the
late 2010s — face financial shortfalls, canceled programs and even possible
closures.
Question 1: How are they going to come back? Question 2: If
you need a global health crisis to properly appreciate them, should they come
back in the same way?
Italy was the first European country to lock down, imposing
strict travel restrictions to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Its 464
state-run museums, monuments and archaeological sites were not spared;
admissions cratered by 76 percent between 2019 and 2020, according to the
Italian Culture Ministry. The previously supersaturated Vatican Museums —
technically not in Italy, and the fourth most visited museum worldwide — saw an
81 percent decline in attendance, from 6.8 million in 2019 to 1.3 million in
2020 (and a million of those came in the two months before the first lockdown).
Last year’s blowout Raphael exhibition here in Rome was seen by just 120,000
visitors; the Leonardo exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, before the pandemic,
was seen by 10 times that many.
The Italian government authorized museums in “yellow zones”
— which included Rome, as well as Milan, Turin, Venice, Florence and Naples —
to reopen on April 26. At first the doors were open for just a few days a week,
and with mandatory booking; now most of Italy is in a “white zone,” and museums
can operate at their full summer schedule. Still, on a Saturday, I counted four
other visitors to the most anticipated show of the year in Rome: “The Torlonia
Marbles: Collecting Masterpieces,” at the Capitoline, showcasing a collection
of Greek and Roman sculpture unseen for decades. It felt more like a private
viewing, and also a sort of democratic disaster: so long in the shadows, and
then no one catches them in the light!
Official data on Italian museum attendance for April, May
and June will not be available until next quarter. But at the Vatican Museums,
which averaged 22,000 visitors a day before the pandemic, just 3,000 are coming
through on weekdays, and 5,000 on the weekends, according to a Vatican
spokesman. On a Monday morning, instead of the usual hurly-burly at the
entrance there were just a few selfie-stick salesmen. Inside the Sistine
Chapel, where in the past I have been shoved and elbowed by the crowds, about
30 spectators were awing over Perugino’s frescoes and craning to see
Michelangelo’s burly musclemen on the ceiling. No photos!
Paolo Nicolini, the museums’ deputy director, described to
me “an increase in young people’s visits and interactions with the Vatican
Museums like never before,” adding that Italians now constitute a majority of
visitors for the first time in recent memory. These bucket-list entries have
become paintings again, and the Romans I caught up with were, to put it
diplomatically, not overly distraught at the lack of visitors.
Still, a public health crisis is hardly the ideal solution
for overcrowding, and hundreds of millions of euros in losses are a steep price
to pay for a shorter line. If mass tourism is the problem, Piranesian ruin porn
is not the solution.
The Italian government has stepped in with a culture
stimulus of 6.7 billion euros — about $8 billion — much of it targeting
improvements to museums’ notoriously poor digital offerings. But the country’s
museums have swung wildly between official neglect and tourist oversaturation,
and need new, more solid foundations to encourage scholarship, maintain
audiences, elicit funding and direct visitors past the biggest landmarks in the
largest cities.
“There are ways to engage audiences where tourists and local
publics may go together,” said Annalisa Cicerchia, a professor at the
University of Rome Tor Vergata and co-author of a new report on Italian museums
after the pandemic. With the tour groups away, she said, Italian museums need
to use this time to expand outreach and education efforts — pointing to recent
successes Rome’s museums have made with programs for migrants and for older
people.
Above all, the pandemic mandates that museums come up with
an actual reason for being, a mission that ever-climbing tourist numbers
allowed them to keep hazy. “Basically, the question is the same: What does a
given museum have that’s unique?” Cicherchia said. “Relevant for your
experience, and for your life? Or for memories you will cherish in the future?”
There were hints of an answer to that question in a few
Roman institutions, such as the National Museum of 21st-Century Art, better
known as MAXXI. In its Zaha Hadid-designed home, there is a giant show of
artists from the former Yugoslavia, as well as an omnibus exhibition of recent
programs on technology and migration, that point to how a Roman museum can
foreground local and regional concerns and still draw an audience. (Cicherchia
cited MAXXI’s new outpost in L’Aquila, where local visitors are coming by the
thousands and local students have been trained as guides, as a particular
success of public outreach.)
Or, for a darker view of the future, there is Damien Hirst,
who has taken over almost every room of the Borghese Gallery with a show of
counterfeit antiquities from a fictional shipwreck. Bernini’s “Daphne and
Apollo,” among the most delicately carved marble sculptures ever created, must
share its gallery with three sculptures of chained enslaved couples whose
finishes recall polystyrene packaging. Spot paintings as bland as a vegan
carbonara hang among the Raphaels and Renis, and bogus barnacle-covered gods
and heroes lord over actual ancient statuary. It is among the most perverse and
outrageous exhibitions I have ever seen; it feels like an act of public
masochism — and I think I might have liked it.
When I saw these fake antiquities four years ago, I had the
same reaction as almost everyone else: atrocious. That view has not changed —
but in empty Rome, still reeling from a year’s cultural deprivation, I felt
myself oddly moved by this catastrophic imposture, and the hopelessness of
Hirst’s Roman holiday.
The Renaissance, after all, was also a time for imitation
antiquities, when amid plagues and upheavals the rich built pleasure palaces
simulating Rome’s glory days. We do not even get the gloss of erudition that
the Borghese princes put on it; just that Piranesian feeling that the good
times are past, and you are here to walk through the ruins.
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