Pietro Domenico Olivero, The Teatro Regio in Turin, c. 1740. Turin, Palazzo Madama. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
In November 2000 the Constitutional Court files judgment number 503. The operative part runs a single line: Legislative Decree no. 134 of 23 April 1998, the one that had converted Italy’s opera houses by fiat into private-law foundations, is unconstitutional. The government had exceeded the powers delegated to it by Parliament. A few days later, on 24 November, the government issues Decree-Law no. 345, which orders the same transformation all over again and makes it run backwards, from 23 May 1998. La Scala, the San Carlo, La Fenice, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and the other houses with their orchestras had been private foundations for two and a half years by virtue of an unconstitutional rule. From that day they were so by virtue of a new, retroactive one.
To understand how things came to that month, we have to go back to 1967. Law no. 800 of 14 August 1967 had recognised in opera and concert activity a “considerable general interest” and had given the autonomous opera companies legal personality under public law. They were, in essence, pieces of the State that made music, with deficits the State covered. The change of course was not born in a law on culture. It was born in the law of 28 December 1995, no. 549, entitled “Measures for the rationalisation of public finance”: in article 2, paragraph 57, Parliament delegates the government to convert the music companies into foundations. The birth certificate of the opera and symphonic foundations therefore sits in a measure on the public accounts, next to that year’s tax and health provisions.
The decree that followed, no. 367 of 29 June 1996, laid out a precise mechanism. The new foundations would pursue, “not for profit, the diffusion of musical art”; the president would be the mayor of the city; and private parties who guaranteed each year at least twelve per cent of operating funding would have a representative on the board. The private form was the vessel, private money the expected content. The houses had three years to vote on the transformation. That in 1998 the government felt the need to impose it by decree, without waiting for their resolutions, says enough on its own about how slow the voluntary road had proved.
The rest is a chronicle of adjustments. In 2003 law no. 310 added the fourteenth foundation, the Petruzzelli in Bari. In 2010 Decree-Law no. 64 rewrote the arrangements with the declared aim of “encouraging a drive toward efficiency, economy and entrepreneurship”. In 2011 a regulation set the criteria for recognising special organisational forms, a greater autonomy that went to La Scala and Santa Cecilia. And in that same year the Constitutional Court, in judgment no. 153, put in writing what everyone in the theatres knew: the opera houses, though privatised, retain a “marked public character”, and the State funding they receive is “far greater” than that from the Regions. Private in legal form, public in economic substance and in oversight, from the Court of Auditors to the ministry’s supervision.
That is why, when an Italian musician says they work for a foundation, they are describing a public-finance decision made thirty years ago more than an artistic one. The form has remained, the patronage that was meant to fill it has arrived unevenly, and the mayor, or someone he appoints, still sits at the top of the structure almost everywhere. Article 11 of the 1996 decree had put it this way: the foundation’s president is the mayor of the municipality where it is based, “regardless of the size of the contribution to the endowment”.