Beautiful but lonely -- not all of Italy's museums get crowds

Francesco Ra is the Maytag repairman of Italian tourism.

He is the guard and greeter at the least-visited museum in all of Italy: the National Royal Palace Museum of Pisa. Days, sometimes weeks, go by without seeing a single art lover or curious tourist.

"I read a lot," Ra said. When a reporter wandered by, he practically snapped to attention, eagerly offering the guest sign-in book, with its many blank pages.

The image of Italy as a crowded mecca for tourists, with miles-long waits outside the Vatican and the Colosseum, and cheek-to-jowl crowds along Venice's canals and in Florence's Piazza della Signoria, is an accurate one. Italy, a nation of bountiful artistic riches, is overrun with visitors seemingly year-round.

But not every jewel gets the same attention. Federculture, a national organization that offers management advice to Italy's network of about 4,000 museums, last month published a ranking of the country's 15 least-frequented attractions, part of a campaign to urge the state to take better advantage of its cultural resources.

The top two sites (or bottom two, actually) were archaeological parks in the somewhat remote region of Puglia. One site, Siponto, with its ancient Greek ruins, receives four visitors a year. Pisa's National Royal Palace Museum, featuring works by Raphael and Bronzino, was the lowest-ranking museum on the list, with just 299 visitors a year.

Given that the Leaning Tower of Pisa is but a few blocks away, and gets approximately 2.2 million visitors a year, the museum definitely has a problem.

"The whole world comes to Pisa for one thing only: the tower," museum official Loredana Brancaccio said. The hordes arrive at the tilted wonder, jump from their buses, snap their photos and leave town. "They're the bite-and-run tourists," she said.

The disparity between the very visited and the lonely lose-outs develops because there are simply so many things to see in Italy, and because the state has failed to better package and promote what it has, said Giorgio Van Straten, a curator and head of Federculture.

Van Straten said Italy could do better for its patrimony if it coordinated management of sites across the country, sold more "multiple" tickets that grouped museums together for visitors and generally made museums and other sites more tourist-friendly.