Abstract

The assay concerns the impact of recent reforms granted to state museums on local authority museums, offering a whole series of innovations regarding the mission of museums; not only collecting objects (universitas rerum) but places for research as well as promotion and dissemination of knowledge, with the organization and management centred on updated standards of efficiency and safety, connected to a network. All this becomes even more necessary for Civic Museums, given the extreme diversification as far as size and structuring is concerned, so that it is essential both an adjustment to the standards set by national legislation and the inclusion in a network system in order to have the possibility of taking advantage from the resulting synergies and economy of scale. Whereas for the more structured museums it is preferred a sort of subjectivity since the “office-museumµ, directly managed by the local administration, is subject to management and accounting rules that can hamper the required flexibility of a cultural service, posing problems when resorting to profitability ratios obtainable from cultural venues like, on the contrary it is allowed, through appropriate tools and institutions, by the most recent legislation