Could the rest of Italy's heritage follow Pompeii down the drain?

The collapse of a 2,000-year-old building at the World Heritage site questions Italy’s ability to maintain its cultural assets

‘WELL, JUST GO for a visit to the Uffizi, in Florence. It is dirty, smelly, and there are certain rooms where, when it rains, the water just runs down the wall.”

Maria Pia Guermandi, a senior figure in Italy’s oldest environmentalist lobby, Italia Nostra, has just answered one of the most frequently asked questions in the country this week. In the wake of the collapse of the Domus of the Gladiators in Pompeii last weekend, how many other World Heritage sites in Italy can now be considered at risk?

Her answer is less than comforting. The Forum, the Colosseum, the Uffizi and many other important but less well-known archaeological treasures all suffer from a chronic lack of routine maintenance. Guermandi jokes that Italy’s entire cultural patrimony should be handed over to the care of the United Nations. “It seems to me that we are no longer capable of administering the whole thing,” she says. “Once we were good at it, but now . . . This was not just the collapse of one house. It was an affront for the entire patrimony and credibility of Italian restoration and one that has done huge damage to the country.”

Even as the first news of the collapse of the Domus of the Gladiators was breaking the president of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, was calling the incident a matter of shame for his country.

The seasoned tourist might shrug his shoulders and wonder what’s new. To the foreign visitor Italy has always seemed culpable of chronic mismanagement of its unparalleled cultural heritage, whether the government of the day is centre right or centre left.

Sometimes the tourists get so upset that they try to do something. A few years ago, when a group of US tourists arrived at the Villa Romana del Casale, in Piazza Armerina, Sicily, they were so horrified by the filthy, unkempt site, which features outstanding Roman frescoes, that they bought some plastic bags and started to clean up.

The collapse of the Domus of the Gladiators comes at the end of a year that has seen some worrying mishaps. Pompeii’s Domus of the Chaste Lovers, Nero’s famous Golden Palace in Rome and the Colosseum have all experienced “collapses” of varying degrees of seriousness.

Yet it would be misleading and grossly unfair to suggest that Italy does not care about its treasures. When it comes to art restoration, Italian academics and technicians lead the way. No country has a greater knowledge in the field. So what has gone wrong?

While opposition politicians in parliament are inevitably calling for the resignation of culture minister Sandro Bondi this week, some archaeological experts would argue that the roots of the problem so spectacularly embodied by the Pompeii collapse go back a long way. Sure, Pompeii appears to have been shamefully mismanaged, but a constant problem of the past 20 years has been that sites have been administered with an eye on short-term electoral gain rather than with a view to long-term good husbandry.

Put another way, rather than spending time and energy cleaning out the drains, various site administrations have opted for high-profile media events that attract not only front-page headlines but also box-office takings. Italia Nostra names the multimedia tour of another Pompeii building, the Domus of Giulio Polibio (for which the visitor to Pompeii has to buy a second ticket), as just one such commercialised distraction.

Clearly there is a problem with arts funding. Italy’s culture ministry is awarded 0.18 per cent of the national budget, approximately a quarter of the proportion in France and Germany. There are important sites all over the country where funds are not available to employ even a caretaker.

Yet funding is not the only issue. Over the past two and a half years Pompeii's soprintendenza, or administration, working with a staff of more than 400 people, has spent €79 million. Somehow, however, as TV footage this week illustrated, no one has got around to cleaning up the weeds that clog the drainage system.

Most experts agree that the major reason for the Pompeii collapse was a lack of routine maintenance or, more precisely, the failure to keep the drainage system working correctly. In layman’s terms, it works like this: the earth fills up with rainwater, it gets heavier, it leans against the building, it shifts the building, it opens up cracks in the roof that the water infiltrates.

Guermandi draws a parallel between the Pompeii collapse and the current flooding in Veneto, northern Italy, which has caused three deaths, left 10,000 temporarily homeless and drowned more than 200,000 livestock. Both events were precipitated by the “very normal phenomena” of heavy autumnal rains. Both disasters, she says, could have been avoided by proper maintenance of the drainage systems.

“Our land is the problem,” she adds. “We continue to ruin it, cementing it over. If we don’t have an overall change of policy, well, we’ll be left with a few museums and little else. Please keep the international lights on the Italian case . . . because we need everyone’s attention.”