by Jon Lackman | 30 October 2009 | Renaissance
Didier Rykner reads the Italian newspapers and wonders how it could be true that
Giorgio Vasari’s archives, held in his native city of Arezzo and belonging to the Museo Casa Vasari, a private museum whose owner, Count Giovanni Festari, passed away a few days ago, could have been sold for the extravagant sum of 150 million euros to a Russian firm which has not disclosed what it plans to do with them … Vittorio Sgarbi, the famous art historian and former Minister of Italian Culture, known for his numerous antics and for his bluntness, asserts that … this is all a huge prank meant to twist the government’s arm into becoming interested in and acquiring the archives.
