ARTE.it wants Italian Art to be Italy’s strong point

With its 47 Unesco World Heritage sites, 4700 museums, 200 archaeological sites and the largest collection of works of art worldwide, Italy possesses a unique heritage. Art is one of the main tourist attractions of the Country, generating over 91 million presences a year and over 9.4 billion Euros of sales to tourists. Moreover, Italian art and culture represent a great interest for web surfers. In the ranking of the most-searched words in the art field worldwide, Italy ranks top with examples like Leonardo da Vinci (1.2 million searches per month), Colosseo (100 thousand searches), Torre di Pisa (90 thousand searches). But as the Museum Analytics weekly index reports, Italian museums are among the least relevant museums in the world in terms of absolute audience and interaction abilities (Facebook & Twitter), while the top rankings are firmly in the hands of Moma, Victoria&Albert, Tate, Louvre or Tokyo Museum. The reason of this visible discrepancy between the importance and richness of Italian art heritage and the Italian ability to exploit its business potential can be summarized as “lack of a systematic approach”.

On the base of these reflections ARTE.it, start-up born on July 2012 from a NEXTA spin-off (NEXTA is an online publisher referring to FIAT/La Stampa Group), gives life to the first project of Italian art mapping, for the recording of Italian art heritage through the web tools and the new digital media. Today the mapping project includes 10 Italian cities of art, the most important: Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan, Turin, Genoa, Bologna, Naples, Lecce and Palermo. The mapping work concerned the identification, georeferencing and descriptive factsheets writing of over 10.000 landmarks (museums, monuments, churches, art galleries, works of art…); the latters were accompanied by factsheets of the main Italian artists and divided into editorial and author itineraries. In ARTE.it, all the information are linked to a news report on art and culture, which is daily updated and which includes a calendar of exhibitions and art events of the Country.

In parallel to the mapping work, ARTE.it developed an experimental semantic search engine for art and cultural heritage; ARTE.it search engine aims to select, index, classify, organize and connect documents and information, gathered from the web in Italy and worldwide, about the topic of Italian art.

Bacco, Caravaggio (1597)

During the first months of 2013 ARTE.it completed a set of new publications: in March 2013 Aquileia-World Heritage, an interactive iOS web and mobile guide in Italian and in English, released thanks to the partnership of Fondazione Aquileia; the web and mobile mapping of Caserta's Palace and Caserta's UNESCO heritage sites, a iOS web and mobile guide in Italian and in English; on the 10^th of June, on occasion of the 55^th Biennale di Venezia, the Venice Guide.

On the 17^th of October 2013, in Lucca, on occasion of LuBeC, ARTE.it previewed the new BETA version of its web site; the site preview can be consulted on the address preview.arte.it.

The launch of the definitive site is expected on the 1^st of November 2013; among the news the graphics, made to highlights the contents and lead the users through ARTE.it integrated system. The web surfing will be now more fluid and simplified.

ARTE.it is today the first Italian independent technological platform for art and cultural heritage. The project was coordinated, for the technological side, by Gianfranco Pra Floriani, IT manager of ARTE.it; for the contents side by Eleonora Zamparutti, ARTE.it editor-in-chief; for the graphics side by Laura Bellucci, ARTE.it Art Director. Piero Muscarà is Ceo & Cofounder of ARTE.it.

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