Abstract

After the 2014 reform an important part of the Italian State museums became autonomous legal public entities endowed with their own financial statements. We collected the available financial statements of new autonomous museums for the period 2017-2019 and organized an original dataset. In this paper we present the main figures about revenues and costs of these museums and a comparison between their budget structure and those of other international and national museum institutions. The main evidence is that autonomous museums, and above all the largest among them, have been able to raise a significant amount of new financial resources, mainly from increase of tariffs and from public contributions for investments. We analyze the relations between financial variables in museums budgets and the evolution of their attendance. We derive classifications of the different emerging managerial strategies adopted by autonomous museums in two dimensions: first, in what measure strategies on revenues used tariff or nontariff instruments; second, in what measure strategies for attendance were driven by touristic or local demand