Eike Schmidt. Courtesy Uffizi Galleries.
Florence’s Uffizi Gallery is looking to share its wealth. The museum is launching a new program called “Uffizi Diffusi” Italian for “scattered Uffizi” to exhibit works from its renowned collection of Renaissance masterpieces at as many as 100 sites across the greater Tuscany region.
“Art can’t survive on big galleries alone,” director Eike Schmidt told CNN Travel. “We need multiple exhibition spaces all over the region especially in the places where the art itself was born.”
With the ongoing pandemic preventing the institution from welcoming its normal 12,000 visitors a day, Schmidt hopes to “create a different type of tourism,” that will also serve to “ground culture in people’s daily lives.” Uffizi Diffusi would also provide an opportunity to show some of the thousands of pieces in the museum’s collection that are currently relegated to storage facilities ”bring[ing] to light works of art that currently