Here is Italy today for you. We do have apparently 105 million euro from the EU available for Pompei’s maintenance, but the tender procedure will make these works start in the next Fall.

In the meantime, our beautiful villa belonging to Loreio Tiburtino (see picture), in Pompei, has seen one of its external colums collapse. This follows the collapse last year of the Domus Gladiatori, always in Pompei.

I am struck by the new Minister declarations that 20 new employees will arrive in Pompei in the near future. And 5 workers. As if this is even close to what we need to boost our pride and our stock of cultural capital. In the place that comes closest to the Coliseum in attracting tourists, there should be hundreds of new hirees. But there is a sense in which lack of funding availability in the budget drives policy. As if the amount available in total from taxpayers’ money is not huge to start with, and appropriate allocation of these funds is somehow impossible.

We should make sure that waste is cut and a huge amount of resources is redirected toward improving our cultural heritage. We should make tenders urgently executed and works started on time while being carefully monitored. The benefits would obviously be equally huge.

Other solutions could be tried. Since we have stopped some years ago to require from our 18-year old to mandatorily participate  into a 1 year military draft, there is no reason why we could not ask them to give 3 months of their life after school and before/during university to work in the public sector in museums, churches and cultural sites for free.

Not only would Loreio Tiburtino’s villa be safer, it would also go back to its previous splendor.