The Italian cultural heritage had 4,976 museums and similar institutions, both public and private, open to the public in Italy in 2015. They included 4,158 museums, galleries or collections, 282 archeological sites and parks and 536 monuments or monumental compounds.
Italy has a widespread heritage of 1.7 museums or similar institutes every 100 km2 and about one every 12,000 inhabitants. One Municipality out of three had at least a museum.
Regions with the highest number of institutes (30% of the total) were Toscana (548), Emilia-Romagna (477) and Piemonte (427). On the other hand, in the South and Islands area more than half (52,8%) of the archeological sites were found, one out of three (32.6%) was located in Sicilia and Sardegna.
Most of the museums displayed ethnographical and anthropology collections (16.6%); art (15.9%), Ancient archaeology (14.7%) and history (11.5%) followed.
In 2015, museums and other museum exhibition structures registered a record of 110,6 million admissions (+ 6.4% compared to 2011) broken down as follows: 59,2 million for museums, 11.9 million for archaeological sites, 39,3 million for monuments (they were respectively 53,9, 9,5 and 40,5 million in 2011).
Visitors showed a tendency to concentrate on a limited number of destinations; three regions only accounted for 52.1% of visitors: Lazio (22.3%), Toscana (20.6%), Campania (9.2%).
On average there were just over 22 thousand admissions for each museum but highly polarized: the first 20 museums and similar institutions in 2015 attracted almost a third of these visitors (31.9%) while 36.5% registered not more than one thousand admissions per year.
For information:
Fabrizio Arosio
ph. +39 06 4673.7210
arosio@istat.it
Alessandra Federici
ph. +39 06 4673.7265
federici@istat.it