Financial Incompetence of Italian Cultural Officials Highlighted in New Report

"Italy squanders €150m in EU grants" by Tina Lepri, Hannah McGivern, The Art Newspaper 16 May 2016

The southern Italian regions of Sicily, Calabria and Campania have failed to spend hundreds of millions of euros in European Union (EU) culture and tourism funding [...] The chronic mismanagement of EU funds is threatening a number of poorly preserved Sicilian heritage sites [...] The president of Sicily, Rosario Crocetta, his predecessor, Raffaele Lombardo, and four regional managers are under investigation for neglect of duty and damaging the island’s cultural heritage. [...] The EU has also recalled grants worth €70m that it deems to have been misspent by the Sicilian government. [...]  Naples, meanwhile, failed to spend €100m in EU funding that had been earmarked for the conservation of churches and monuments in its historic centre, a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1995, as well as various urban regeneration initiatives. Just eight of 28 planned projects were completed before the 2015 deadline. [...]  In 2013, a report published by Il Corriere della Sera revealed that around 200 of the city’s historic churches—around half the total number—are closed and abandoned.

The Archaeological Museum of Aidone has not renovated its galleries because they did not get funding from the EU because of incomplete documentation and the lack of a sensible economic framework. The museum was to be the new home of the Head of Hades (400-300BC), a Hellenistic terracotta fragment repatriated to Sicily by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in January. But the sculpture remains in limbo in Palermo because the Aidone museum has still not prepared a suitable display for it.