Cultural Heritage: dynamics and institutional knots

The tension between the protection, use and enhancement of cultural heritage is physiological and undeniable. Tension that is destined to increase due to the growing interdependence of cultural heritage with the environmental context, to the increased differentiation in supply and demand and to the ever-greater diversification in the subjects interested in cultural goods and activities both public (state, regions, municipalities, institutions and national agencies and supranational) and private (associations, patrons, sponsors, enterprises, etc.). The effort of the institutions and public policies must be to find a synthesis between the different subjects and the interests at stake. This synthesis can only be ensured through a confrontation in technical-administrative seats of an appropriate scale: often decentralized. Acting in the opposite direction (centralizing) is contradictory and often counterproductive because it generates a growth in fragmentation. Containing the latter, making interdependence one of the main variables of public policies is therefore one of the most important challenges on which to focus attention.