Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

Colossal Effort

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We had fun with our tongue-in-cheek commentary Colosseum ‘Naming Rights’ about the Italian government’s plea for private funding to restore this seminal landmark. Now, we’re eating some of our words.

Diego Della Valle, owner of the wildly successful Tod’s luxury shoe and accessories company, based in Le Marche, has pledged €25 million (approximately $33 million) to the project. The motivation appears to be noble. Della Valle is quoted in the Wall Street Journal, “You won’t find a Tod’s shoe or bag hanging from the Colosseum’s walls. It’s an undertaking with great cultural relevance and that’s enough. We are ambassadors of Italy’s life style and it’s really our duty to give off a strong symbol.”

Meanwhile, the stunning results of a just completed $1.4 million restoration of the Colosseum’s hypogeum (the levels lying below the ground) are the subject of a fascinating article in this month’s Smithsonian. Heinz-Jürgen Beste of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, led a team of German and Italian archeologists in a 14-year project deciphering the functions of the hypogeum. This subterranean nerve center housed elaborate mechanisms for storing—and raising to stage level—the scenery, equipment and wild beasts employed in the lavish, gruesome spectacles.

The Colosseum flourished from the first to sixth centuries AD. After the empire crumbled, the massive structure successively became a stone quarry, a dump, and shopping center. All the while, natural decay took its course eventually burying the hypogeum under 40 feet of soil. During Benito Mussolini’s glorification of ancient Rome in the 1930s, crews excavated the earth hiding the hypogeum but the inner workings remained a mystery.

Thanks to the contributions of Tod’s and the scholarship of Beste and other archeologists, the Colosseum will continue to reveal its wonders. But what about the Italian sites (nearly 40 in all) on the World Monuments Fund Watch Sight? This a list that calls attention to endangered cultural locations.  Pompeii has been on the list since 1996 and is recently in the news because of the increasing rate in which structures there are collapsing.

Pompeii's Temple of Venus

The future of these sites is indeed uncertain.  Newsweek reports in The Ruined Ruins that the 2011 budget of the Italian cultural ministry, which finances most preservation, is $340 million, down from $603 million in 2008. You can learn more about efforts to save Italy’s treasures at the culture watchdog and education group Italia Nostra site.

Tell us what you think about saving Italy’s archeological treasures.

Who should pay for it? Is it worth the cost?

Colosseum “Naming Rights”

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Telecom Italia Colosseum has a certain ring to it. Or maybe Fiat Group Colosseum will triumphantly cruise into the winners circle. But then again,  the Banca Popolare di Milano may have deeper pockets to make the Colosseum its own.

If all goes to plan, a corporation could soon be restoring the Roman Colosseum, one of the most-recognized antiquities in the world.

As Ella Ide of Reuters reports in Italy Turns to Private Sector to Help Colosseum in the Washington Post, the cash-strapped Italian government is looking for a corporate angel to pony up $32 million to completely restore the Colosseum and make it fully accessible to visitors by 2013.

Of course, I’m using the phrase “naming rights” ironically. The article does not specify whether the donor will plaster its name on the facade. Plus, there is precedent. The Vatican carried through a controversial deal with Japan’s Nippon Television Network to fund the restoration of Michaelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. In return, Nippon filmed the entire project and also released a massive coffee table book documenting the process.

Are corporations the new-millenium Medici? Do business conglomerates know the first thing about restoring priceless antiquities? How do you feel about the Colosseum going begging?