Rome 1976-1985: a cultural policy in the international comparison

Renato Nicolini, a former cultural commissioner of the Rome municipalitybetween 1976 and 1985, passed away at the beginning of August.This revue honours his innovative cultural work and his memory bringingout his speech (first published by Guida Editori, Napoli: see reference), ata conference promoted by the Rome municipality in 1984 on Culturalpolicies in the United States and Italy: divergences and convergences.The conference saw the participation - along with the representatives of theItalian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and of local administrators andexperts - of representatives of the National Endowment for the Arts ResearchDivision, of local Arts Councils, of the Brooklyn Academy of Music,as well as of academics like Joseph La Palombara, Stephen Benedict andMark Schuster.Refusing any cultural or political model, and conscious of the problematicrole of government in this field, in his contribution Nicolini suggests toconsider the public cultural policies realized in different metropolises asexperiences with their specific features that can be traced back to a type ofcultural policy. In this perspective he points out some typological elementscharacterising his experience, and notably the major achievements of his«Roman summers»: their democratic, not pedagogic or excluding, nature,aimed at unusual mixtures of different cultural genres and different publics;its low cost and «ephemeral» (versus «permanent» character) as a first steptowards the upgrading of cultural demand and the, more expensive, renewalof cultural infrastructures; the dimension of people involved (smallerthan in New York's Central Park experience); the pursuit of new ways ofpublic/private partnership, where government (approaching the Americanmodel) should act more as a catalyst and a service provider than a directsource of funding. Always present, in Nicolini's remarks, are also his politicaland socialising aims to create opportunities of festive meetings in theevenings and nights of everyday life in a time of hard social and politicalviolence, fostering a community experience for various individuals living ina scattered metropolis as Rome. Thus reversing the then popular «culturaldecentralisation model» by proposing the very historic centre, the ancientarchaeological as well as the Renaissance and Baroque Rome, as scenes fordifferent shared cultural experiences in the search of an urban (common)identity.