Venice: beautiful city of magic atmosphere. Once a super-power, now a decadent and romantic escape.Its past grandeur still lives through the fantastic architecture, splendent churches and Renaissance treasures.

Yet, there is one place that does not comply to standards – the Gallerie dell’Accademia, supposedly one of the top 10 museums in the world, certainly the one with the best collection of Bellini’s masterpieces.

On my trip to Venice back in October 2015, I took my husband to the Accademia to show him with pride the vast numbers of treasures in the collection.

Well, the visit turned out to be a complete shambles – the museum was closing at 5pm rather than at 7pm (two hours before closing time!) due to an employee assembly taking place in the gallery! Of course, we still had to pay the full ticket price despite having only an hour to visit everything and this meeting not been publicised on the website (rather, we found out about it thanks to a piece of paper stitched to the front door, once we got to the museum).

This was only the beginning of this frustrating visit – I soon found myself walking among cracks on the floor and on the ceiling, nets hanging to protect the paintings from the ceiling falling down – you can see the photos below to get an idea.

I did read the article on Apollo Magazine about the appalling state of the museum, but I did not expect it to be so bad. I thought journalists had slightly exaggerated. Sadly I was wrong.

At this point I was really ashamed of ‘showing off’ those ‘treasures’ to my husband. But it was not the end of it. My husband Robert is a collector and catalogues art – he wanted to buy some postcards of the many Bellini, Lotto and Giorgione from the museum shop. Little did we know that the museum ‘shop’ was relegated to a corner selling a slim selection of postcards.

But as soon as we came out of the museums, we discovered that the entire museum collection was available on postcards printed from photos taken by amateurs and sold from the portable shops just by the bridge – ‘copyright’ is clearly a foreign word.

I was so angry that day that I decided to report my experience in an email to the Minister of Culture, On. Min. Dario Franceschini – broadly highlighting the points above but also offering help for new ideas to improve the cultural offer. I received a response about a week later from Min. Plen. Uberto Vanni d’Archirafi – very kind, polite and factual, explaining how new directors have been appointed to renovate and promote the museums across Italy, that the cracks will be repaired, that investments have been made to open new rooms and improve the museums but unfortunately all this will take time. Unfortunately my offer for help was not taken up.

Six months later and here we are again at the Accademia to see the exhibition on Manunzio.

And yes, the cracks have been repaired. But isn’t this the minimum standard for a world class museum? What would you say if you found cracks at the National Gallery or at the Louvre? I bet you would be outraged. But in Italy people have a different attitude.

I hear too often excuses from fellow Italians along the lines of ‘we have too many things to take care of in Italy’, ‘it costs a lot of money to put up an exhibition’, ‘the State has no money so how can it subsidise the museums?’.

Let me say something: there must be something fundamentally wrong with the management of the Accademia. It is true that it might take time to transform the museum, but it does not take time to introduce a series of small but effective changes, which most museums around the world have adopted a long time ago. It is the lack of commercial awareness, rather than willingness tor good intention to change that lies at the heart of the problem.

I have tried to highlight the main points here:

1) Exhibition ticket price: the standard €15 ticket gave us access to the main collection as well as to the exhibition (and additionally to Palazzo Grimani), while I understand the standard ticket price is €9. Why is €15 not the standard ticket price? This is the rate for most world class museums – take the Louvre (€15) but even the Staedel Museum in Franfurt (€14) – I have never seen these museums short of visitors and I don’t think people wouldn’t be willing to pay few extra Euros to go into the gallery. I know that in Italy we are almost afraid to charge people to access culture but the museums need money and they cannot be subsidised forever.

2) Audioguides: a new and very fancy audioguide in the form of a pen was available at the exhibition. Great, but why was it available for free? Again, I don’t think people would have not purchased the audio guide for a small fee, like €2-3.

3) Advertisement: we saw many posters around Venice sponsoring the Manunzio exhibition – unfortunately they were just showing a picture and they didn’t tell people where the exhibition was (or what it was about for that matter). Maybe it was supposed to be a treasure hunt.

4) Membership scheme: I don’t understand why there is no membership scheme available at the Accademia (at least as far as I could see from the website or in the museum itself) as there is in many other museums across the world (I think in the UK even the smallest museum has a membership scheme). It’s a great way to sponsor the museum and to raise money through events at the same time – don’t forget most members are art lovers and willing to pay for lectures, courses etc…

5) Lockers / cloackroom: I hope this is on the list of improvements already but I was very disappointed to find out that there were only about 20 lockers available in the whole museum – 5 of which broken and the others already taken. Result: we had to carry our backpack across the gallery and we were constantly told off by the guards if we were carrying it on the shoulders to ease the pain of dragging it around. For some unknown reason, there was no sign of a cloackroom. But I am happy to be told that we simply missed it.

6) Missing paintings: why on earth when a painting is lent to another museum or moved elsewhere for an exhibition do we need to see an empty space? Do I really believe that such a museum does not have plenty of replacement works in storage? Or could not make a deal with other museums to swap some paintings? No, I don’t. I am sorry but I think this is just laziness. It certainly does not look good as you can see from the pictures of the missing ‘San Girolamo e un devoto‘ by Piero Della Francesca, now in Forli’ and the missing ‘La Tempesta‘ by Giorgione, temporarily located at the Manunzio’s exhibition.

7) Shop and merchandising: whilst the exhibition shop was very good (although they ran out of postcards of ‘Ritratto di donna in veste di Flora‘ by Bartolomeo Veneto – the covering image of the exhibition), the main shop was no different from 6 months ago. This is something I really struggle to understand – there is now additional space available to re-locate the shop and we’re approaching the high tourist season – surely merchandising should be one of the top priorities to help fund the museum?

It makes me very sad to see that yet again Italy seems to fall behind. It makes me angry because we have all the resources to be excellent, but somehow we cannot deliver a top class product – this is obviously not helping our image abroad. What do you think all the tourists that visit the Accademia think? I am sure many of them will not pay attention to the lack of postcards or to the missing paintings – and many others will not let this spoil their visit to Venice. But there are also many others (an increasing number I would say) that expect a different experience when they visit a museum.

It’s 2016 – it’s time to catch up with the rest of the world!

PS – You will be wondering why I decided to share my thoughts via a blog post and I did not contact the museum or the competent authorities instead. Well, I would be more than happy to discuss the matter with the recently appointed Director of the Accademia, Dr. Paola Marini. However, my previous letter was also sent to the museum’s press department (as at the time I could not find her email address) – I heard nothing back.