The Offices of Florence, closed Monday for the bridge of All Saints, have drawn the wrath of the new Italian Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano.
He regrets that this closure "
prevented thousands of people from visiting the museum during the All Saints' Day
".
In a letter addressed to the director of the gallery, Eike Schmidt, and made public on Wednesday November 2, the minister castigates the choice of the management not to leave the building open, arguing that precedents and other examples of openings to the occasion of public holidays exist: "
It will not escape his intelligence that a closure of this type represents, in addition to a loss of income, an attack on the
“, he denounced.
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In Florence, the Uffizi and its gallery contain one of the oldest and most famous art collections in the world: 8,000 m² of masterpieces of Italian painting, and in particular those of the greatest painters of the Renaissance.
You can discover works by Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio or Titian.
Apart from Mondays, the building is only closed to the public on January 1 and May and December 25.
In 2021, the Uffizi Gallery was the most visited cultural venue in Italy.
Read alsoSporty or artistic, five new reasons to go to Florence
A “lack of staff”
Faced with this volley of green wood, the backlash was not long in coming: Eike Schmidt, who not without irony "
thanked
" the Minister for his intervention, deplored in a letter that "
for seven years, in spite of the increase in the number of visitors, the workforce has been reduced by dozens
".
"
We always do our best to ensure extraordinary openings, but if we don't reverse the staff reductions, we won't be able to do it anymore
," he says.
“
For years, I have been asking for reinforcements from the ministry, because the hiring of staff is not the responsibility of museums (…) but of the ministry
,” underlines Mr. Schmidt.
“
I am scandalized like the minister by these closures.
Unfortunately, the problem of lack of people
l (...)
concerns practically all the museums, libraries and archives of the country
", he adds before definitively sending the minister back to the ropes: "
the situation is now insoluble without a clear and decisive intervention
" of the ministry.
In the meantime, the museum has reopened its doors to visitors, as planned.