Italy Allocates Over $1 Billion for Cultural Heritage Sites

The Italian government announced yesterday that it has earmarked over $1 billion for restoration and construction projects at thirty-three museums, monuments, and archaeological sites throughout the country, Hannah Mcgivern of the Art Newspaper reports.
Culture minster Dario Franceschini has called the funding the “biggest investment in cultural heritage” in the country’s history. The “one billion for culture” campaign will provide much needed support to the archaeological sites of Pompeii, Campi Flegrei, and Herculaneum. Naples’s National Archaeological Museum will receive over $20 million and its Capodimonte Museum will be given over $30 million to improve exhibition spaces. The Uffizi galleries will use over $40 million of the funding to execute a plan to modernize its facilities that was formulated in the 1960s. Among the many other heritage sites benefiting from the culture campaign is the city of L’Aquila, which is still recovering from an earthquake which devastated the area in 2009.