Eike Schmidt, director of Italy’s most important museum, is working on an ambitious project called Uffizi Difussi, which would entail a “delocalization” that will lead the gallery to spread its archive of art pieces throughout the city and region, outside the walls of Florence, making available to the public many works “hidden” in the deposits thanks to their exposure in museum spaces throughout Tuscany.
This will be done according to a principle that takes into account the identity and territory of the chosen places. One of Uffizi Diffusi’s goals is to cope with the challenges linked to over tourism.
We must be prepared for the return of global and massive tourism, when the pandemic ends. The idea of polycentrism is virtuous because it will spread tourism over several centers of attraction, and will make them participate in the economic flowering. We need to think more and more in terms of a region of art, and not just a city of art
Eike Schmidt, Uffizi’s director
For the moment, Schmidt has announced five locations: the Villa Medicea of Careggi, the Museum of the Battle of Anghiari, the Civic Museum of Pescia, the Visitor Center of the National Park of the Casentino Forests Monte Falterona and Campigna and the Villa Medicea “Ambrogiana” of Montelupo, once the site of the judicial psychiatric hospital, “whose recovery will represent a very important acquisition for the entire national museum landscape.
The museums that will enter the Uffizi “network” will therefore contribute to slow tourism, connecting to all the activities that this entails: from food and wine to sports, within a system of reciprocity.
The widespread museum will give the model of the twenty-first century, already adopted in England at the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum. We will be the first in Italy
Eike Schmidt, Uffizi’s director
“We are working on a collaboration that is no longer occasional with peripheral museums,” said Schmidt. “Even far beyond the periphery, in the open countryside. Despite the fact that Florence’s city walls were torn down by Poggi in 1865, I still notice a lot of antithesis between the city and the outside, ‘the contado’ as it was called in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a very positive way.”
For the Uffizi, the collaboration with other Tuscan entities is an advantage because the Uffizi not only has the duty to protect the works of art, but also to communicate and make accessible those that lie in their archives. “Let’s be clear that it’s not a question of expanding like the Uffizi, but of working in absolute parity with smaller realities to develop projects together,” said Schmidt.
The choice of the works and of the places where to exhibit them will take into account not only the tourist opportunity, but first of all the identity of a territory and of those who live there. “The experience of the exhibition of the Tavola Doria, a copy of the legendary Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo, has doubled the number of visitors to the Museum of Anghiari, and this will be the path that we will follow.”
In 2021, Schmidt hopes to bring to Castagno di Andrea the portrait of Dante made by Andrea Del Castagno himself, after the restoration at the Opificio. In this case, the place has not only a link with the artist, but also with the subject depicted: Castagno has a decisive role in the life of Dante, who stayed there before being condemned to exile.
At Careggi, the propelling center of humanism, the Uffizi will contribute to the choral operation led by the President of the Region, Eugenio Giani, by exhibiting works related to the birth of Ficino’s Neoplatonic Academy, which was based in the villa, and which will illustrate the moment of philological study of classical Greek and Latin literature.
In some cases, recovery works will be necessary. The most considerable, in Montelupo, an operation of international relevance, as well as the recovery of an exceptional asset: more than 20 thousand square meters in size, the architecture of the sixteenth century that has resisted almost untouched by time.
