blood from stones
"It's easier to get blood from those stones than it is to raise money in Italy," said Cornelia Lauf, a curator and art historian at John Cabot University in Rome. "From my own experience, high and old culture is seen as national patrimony, and to be maintained by the state, or else should be the fiefdom of those families who commissioned and still own a lot of it. Not the responsibility of everyman."
Prato and Buttiglione acknowledged that Italians were unused to donating to such causes. This year's fund-raising campaign has no specific monetary goal, apparently because of the uncertainty of how much can be raised.
But Prato said he saw signs of a slow change in favor of Italians' supporting the arts themselves. As Lauf pointed out, art here had long been considered the province of the rich, but Prato said more and more Italians were visiting museums and spending more on cultural activities as the museums themselves aimed to become more user-friendly and egalitarian.
Buttiglione said the measure of success at the moment was not how much money was raised but getting Italians' attention: the clear aim of a campaign he called "provocative."
"We think it is good to shake the consciousness of people," he said, "to make them aware that there is a problem."
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