Eike Schmidt: Meloni wants the former director of the Uffizi as mayor of Florence

Eike Schmidt (Freiburg, 1968) is a man with brilliant outbursts for public art pedagogy. An extraordinary museum director who has brought the Uffizi Gallery in Florence into the 21st century by applying new museum management techniques. Schmidt is an erudite, conversational and open guy. A declared “anti-fascist” man. And, furthermore, he is German. The theory says that all these elements would make him a stereotype that is not typical of the candidate profile that Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s party, usually presents for mayors in Italy. But, precisely for that reason, because of his ability to fish in other fishing grounds, the prime minister now wants him as a candidate for mayor of Florence. And he is thinking about it, but it seems one of the few possible ways to wrest from the left an unassailable fiefdom for almost five decades in the elections that will probably be held at the beginning of June.

Schmidt has been the director of the Uffizi for nine years (since 2015), a position he left this Monday to direct the Capodimonte museum in Naples. And in that time, after exhaustive and very well publicized work – by himself and by the communication agency that was in charge of this task – he has become a top-level public figure in Florence and in Italy. The size and influence of the Renaissance gallery, which in Medici times was something like the west wing of the Palazzo Vecchio – the current headquarters of the mayor’s office – has become an institution from which it is also possible to conduct politics and establish debates. publics that affect all citizens.

Recently appointed director of the Uffizi Gallery, Eike Schmidt, the first foreigner to govern one of Italy’s greatest cultural exponents, grabbed a microphone and launched a message through the outdoor speakers against pickpockets and petty scammers. Someone was concerned for the first time—and with a German accent, by the way—about the chaos reigning at the museum’s doors. But three days later, the Florence police showed up at his office and handed him a fine of about 300 euros for making advertisements on public roads without the corresponding permit. The next morning, Schmidt went to City Hall, dug deep into his pocket, and paid the debt. One more example of his interventionist, and somewhat populist and popular, conception of the management of the museum, which receives almost four million visitors a year.

The German director—recently naturalized Italian—has not yet made the final decision on whether he should take the step. “Look, I have no news. It’s something I still have to finish meditating on. Everything is open and I don’t have a deadline to decide it,” he points out in a telephone conversation with this newspaper. At the party they confirm that the game is open and that the fact that he has just taken up a new museum management assignment in Naples will not influence the decision. “They are separate things. They have nothing to do with it,” they point out.

Cultural hegemony

The seduction process of Schmidt, who maintains a good relationship with the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, is also part of the radical right’s strategy of giving a central role to culture in its political program. An idea that is linked to the old postulates of the philosopher Antonio Gramsci about cultural hegemony, traditionally attributed to the left and that Meloni’s party now wants to reverse.

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Schmidt, who declares himself a centrist person, believes that Florence must address two fundamental issues: security and infrastructure. The city’s big problem, however, mass tourism and the progressive emptying of the center in favor of tourist apartments and hotels, is not a priority. “I wouldn’t limit visits to the city. But you can work on the idea of scheduling them,” he noted a few days ago in an interview, recalling that this formula was also used at the Uffizi using an algorithm to decongest the museum.

The left has already begun its campaign against Schmidt. The current mayor, Dario Nardella, has accused him of failing to meet the deadlines in which he planned to apply the reforms to the Uffizi. Other voices assert that the current director of Capodeimonte secured a place at the Neapolitan museum in exchange for appearing in Florence, so that if he lost the electoral race he would have a place to continue working. Obviously, Schmidt denies this point, despite how strange it might be if he returned to Florence a few days after landing in the Parthenopean city.

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