words by Elizabeth Ganley-Roper
Earlier this month, a number of museum curators and managers working for some of Italy’s most important museums, libraries and national archives published their salaries online as a sing of protest. The purpose? To highlight the inequality of their earnings as compared to those of parliamentary members and government officials.
The numbers are shocking. For example, while the state pays the General Director of Consob (Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa) €395,000 net, the director of the Uffizi, Antonio Natali, gets 11 times less. The ex-General Secretary of the Senate Antonio Malaschini yearly pension is €519,015 net, whereas the director of the National Gallery of Antique Art of Palazzo Barberini, Anna Lo Bianco, gets 16 times less, €32,535, and earns just €1,765 net per month (a fourth of what a salesclerk earns at Palazzo Madama home to the Senate of the Italian Republic).
Other prominent figures who adhered to the prostest and published their salaries on-line include: Maria Grazia Bernardini - Castel Sant’Angelo Museum, Anna Coliva - Galleria Borghese, Andeina Draghi -Museo di Palazzo di Venezia and Serena Dainotto - Biblioteca dell’Archivio di Stato in Rome.
Those with equal responsibilities abroad, including France, Spain, the UK and Australia, earn two to three times more than their colleagues in Italy.
As the Italian managers explain: “We earn less than €2,000 a month and we do not get any other kind of bonus or compensation”.
Certainly, these highly educated and specialised people, entrusted with the care of some of the world’s most important cultural heritage, deserve to be fairly compensated, just as their colleagues abroad.
