THE UFFIZI’S MASTER JUGGLER

There was outrage last year when Antonio Paolucci, the head of Florence’s museums, appointed himself director of the Uffizi. In a rare interview, he explains to Carla Passino how he copes with both roles – and outlines his vision for the gallery’s future.

He is harder to catch than the Scarlet Pimpernel. His secretary, Marco Fossi, is apologetic but firm: the only possible time for an interview is the New Year holiday, when Florence is enveloped in a chilly mist and everyone is in bed sleeping off a week of long lunches. Everyone, that is, except ‘Il Professore’, who has been at work since seven o’clock. But then Antonio Paolucci, director of the Uffizi, soprintendenteof Florence’s museums and regional director for the Belle Arti in Tuscany, needs every second of every day to juggle all his projects. Art is Paolucci’s lifelong passion. He was born 67 years ago to a family of antique dealers in Rimini, although you would be hard-pushed to find in him even a trace of his city’s singsong lilt. His accent has the polished, neutral note of someone who travels for a living. And indeed his early years with what he calls ‘l’Amministrazione’ – the territorial network of the Italian ministry for arts and culture – read like the Blue Guideto Italy’s art cities, as he moved from Florence to Venice, from Verona to Mantua to climb the managerial ranks at impressive speed. His steady glide to the top culminated in April 1988, when he landed the job that nearly every member of the Amministrazione hopes to get one day – soprintendentefor the artistic and historic heritage of Florence, Prato and Pistoia. This in turn led to a brief stint in 1995 as minister for arts and culture in Lamberto Dini’s Governo Tecnico, an interim government in which key roles went to experts from outside the political arena. ‘Every executive dreams to enter the control room – only to find out that there are no controls, or, if there are, they work little and badly’, he jokes. Paolucci calls his time as a minister a formative experience, which gave him ‘a bird’s eye vision of problems and challenges’. Still, his heart lay in Florence and a year later he was back at the helm of the Soprintendenza, which a 2001 reform has turned into a special body overseeing Florence’s museum network, the Polo Museale Fiorentino. Since then, Paolucci has managed Italy’s

largest art collection, a staggering 250,000 works spread across 20 museums – from the Uffizi and the Galleria dell’Accademia to the Bargello and Palazzo Pitti – that attract more than five million visitors every year. This job alone would be a handful for most people. So it is hardly surprising that there was controversy last year when Paolucci decided also to take on the role of general director of the Uffizi. Former director Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, who had held the position since 1987, left in January 2005, after the ministry refused to extend her contract beyond retirement age. Italian papers had barely started guessing at potential successors when Paolucci, who was in charge of recruitment, announced that he himself would step into the role. It was not an unprecedented move (former soprintendenteLuciano Berti had held both jobs in the 70s) and since Paolucci and Petrioli Tofani had allegedly clashed in the past, it was perhaps to be expected: Paolucci himself calls it ‘logical’. Nonetheless, it caused a storm. The Italian press was rife with speculation that he was only keeping the seat warm until one of the Uffizi’s most promising curators gained enough experience for the post. You only need to talk to Paolucci for a few minutes, however, to dispel that rumour: his workaholic temperament is ill-suited to seat-warming. When I hint that he may one day want to stop working – he is, after all, two years older than Italy’s usual retirement age and, unless his contract is extended, he will retire from the Soprintendenza next September – he conveys polite but genuine disbelief. That said, the main concern voiced at the time of his Uffizi accession – that he may struggle to keep all the balls in the air – is legitimate, especially considering that he is also regional director for Tuscany’s historical and artistic heritage. He himself admits that his three jobs require ‘a hellish amount’ of hard toil. But he has a bottomless capacity for work, which, coupled with little sleep and

Antonio Paolucci in his office in the Uffizi. Photo: Alinari

30 Apollo