Abstract

This article illustrates how a bill of parliament submitted by the government is utterly lacking in analysis of the actual situation of Italian Cultural Institutes and does not confront the principal issues involved in promotion of culture, while referring instead to obvious and extremely general principles, veritable clichés, that nonetheless mask a pronounced desire for instrumental control of culture. The article dwells on analysis of the intention of the law to transform the Italian Cultural Institutes into simple offices abroad for the Ministry. A genuine reform of the entire sector requires just the opposite, in defence of their autonomy, explicit separation of the institutes from the Ministry, creating - following the model of the Goethe Institut - an autonomous institution that is nonetheless affiliated with the Ministries of Foreign and Cultural Affairs (but also with the system of autonomous local entities and explicitly cultural institutions such as universities).