Italy as a comparative case: built cultural heritage and the roles of private and public actors

Since the foundation of the Italian state in 1861, cultural heritage has been an essential tool for nation-building. Italian built heritage, in particular, has been used as a vehicle for narrating national identity and showing consistent features in its diverse places and landscapes. After providing a brief historical overview and a description of the evolution of the institutional system set for preserving heritage in Italy, this chapter analyzes the string of public interventions aimed at managing and valorizing the vast sets of public real estate assets (listed cultural heritage assets in particular), on the one hand, to generate revenues for the state budget and, on the other, to foster local economic development (via tourism). Over the years, several national policies attempted to mix a higher presence of private stakeholders with a stronger role of regional branches (Superintendencies) of the Ministry of Culture. The chapter explains why these privatization initiatives fell short. Firstly, in recent years a considerable number of policy tools and laws have been layered without paying attention to how incompatible and inconsistent they were with one another. Secondly, the lack of a real estate market niche for these assets (namely publicly-owned heritage real estate) in Italy is a clear problem. Within this context, the contribution highlights that both a managerial approach to public real estate and a nomo-dependent approach (i.e. expecting that a new policy tool or bill can solve these problems) seem inappropriate and negatively affect the heritage policy field that is currently dominated by economic and law expertise. By using concrete examples of programs and projects for enhancing the economic value of listed real estate properties in both Northern and Southern Italy, this contribution outlines the reasons why the experimentation of a place-based approach emerged and constitutes a potential innovation in this field. In the conclusion, a set of heritage governance shifts are highlighted making specific reference to the current roles that built heritage plays in the national political arena. Comparison and learnings for Middle-eastern countries are discussed.