Venetian lands have always produced culture, both in the capital, born and grew up on the water, and very intensely also on the mainland: an immediately visible prove of that is the cultural heritage handed on strongly in the historic centre, and noticeable also in a much wider area. Nowadays the situation is dangerously different. Venetian cultural production is in serious decline: trying to spot how much is produced in the cultural field, you find a very limited range of new “products”. Instead, if you measure the consumption (better said, the fruition) of culture, numbers are really huge. In order to briefly explain the concept, we can say that here painters and authors of music or literature are just a few, but that access to museums, exhibitions, concerts and theatres are extremely high. There is therefore a problem of culture production, which is something different from production of cultural fruition.

The first theme is of great importance for the future and it will have to be put urgently as agenda item for people working in it, to start with universities, in order to rebuild an atmosphere able to support it. The theme of fruition today has a big (and deserved) success, it is turned towards the past and it looks like an archive more than a project, even though in this sector selectivity and peculiarity of initiatives and culture of the present can represent a bridge towards new production.

Today it has been presented from the Venice Foundation an important review of all that happened in this field and in this territory in 2005: the reports will allow to appreciate the efforts and the methodology of work, which covers the last four years and uses that fundamental informative source wanted from the Foundation and that you can find on the Web at AgendaVenezia

The data are impressive 13.600 days of events in a year, that is to say everyday an average of 37 cultural activities going on in the Venice province; someone wanting to do all the activities in one day, would have less than 20 minutes of time to spend on each one of them. Apart from paradoxes, the production of cultural fruition is really important and it obviously reflects the presence of the historical centre, where the events in one year have been 1674, i.e. an average of almost 5 new events each day, set up by about 100 bodies, the main of which were the City Council and the Cà Foscari University, with an average of 50 events at the same time in the month of July, with a peak of 60 in the months of September and October. Also the mainland produces important moments of fruition, most of all in the theatre world, where besides Arteven (56 events in one year) there are the fools’theatre of San Donà, Echidna of Dolo, the Villa dei Leoni of Mira and the APT in Jesolo. And last but not least the Candiani theatre in Mestre, which is number one amongst the places of fruition with 142 events.

Why, then, is there such a failure atmosphere surrounding all activities? Probably that place of culture, although productive, could not catch the cultural interest of users: to do things is not enough, you have to do them well. But this is a general question for all the 1,600 registered events, and brings us back to the initial question. The real planning step which still has to be verified is quality, on which the research has not focused yet, even though it is necessary to build towards it an alliance of private and public operators, until now afraid of mutual contact and generically separately active.