The permanent collection hall inside the new Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, Italy. (Richard Harbus for the International herald Tribune)

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'We are very, very, very old," said Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museums, when asked one recent morning whether Italy, rather than moving around the deck chairs of its cultural policy, as it has done for ages, might someday actually consider real reform.

The question came up after a ruckus ensued when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's culture minister, Sandro Bondi, floated the idea some days ago of putting much of the management of the country's 4,000 museums and their cultural heritage into the hands of one person. The person proposed to fill the post was Mario Resca, a businessman who used to run the McDonald's subsidiary in Italy, a pal, as everybody instantly remarked, of Berlusconi.

That plan was then drastically amended in light of fierce opposition from the Italian arts establishment, which includes Paolucci, who made clear he was a friend of Resca. It was nothing personal, he said. But when Pope Leo X, in 1515, wanted someone to look after collections at the Vatican he picked an artist, Raphael.

Paolucci gazed out the large, open picture window in his office, which perfectly framed the ancient dome of St. Peter's.

"E tutto," he said. (Roughly translated, "That says it all.")

Triumphant, as if there really were nothing more anyone could add, he fell silent.

This is Italy, after all. Everyone here believes change is necessary. But then sighs, because it's impossible too. Wholesale change anyway. It's Raphael or bust.

A half-dozen structural revamps of the Culture Ministry during the last decade haven't really done much except to shuffle around the burden of a creaky and defensive bureaucracy. The country is paralyzed by contradictions. Italians say they identify deeply with their cultural patrimony, but they actually don't visit their museums much.

They talk about collective Italian artistic heritage but remain, at heart, profoundly divided by ancient regional differences never quite bridged by unification a century and a half ago, differences that fracture cultural policies.

And so the Berlusconi administration's proposal for a super-manager was ostensibly to cut through decades of red tape, inject an outsider's fresh views and, in straitened times, find new ways to earn more revenue from the country's unparalleled bounty of art and antiquities, especially considering that the ministry's budget is about to be slashed by more than 30 percent over the next three years.

But opponents, not altogether irrationally, stressed that culture demands expertise, not somebody who sold hamburgers, never mind if Resca is admired and successful. The ridiculous choice that presented itself between maintaining the status quo or enlisting the guy who ran McDonald's was somehow typically Italian. In a country where every bid for change is believed to hide some ulterior political motive, detractors suspected the supermanager idea was in fact merely a ploy to ransack national storerooms and grease the path for the prime minister's rich friends who want to hawk precious Italian art abroad. To Americanize the system, in other words.

And perhaps in part it was. But Italians, whose cultural heritage policies have roots in the 1500s, still maintain a very different philosophy toward their belongings. They declare not just precious Roman artifacts and Caravaggios to be national patrimony but also every single Italian building, artwork and piece of furniture more than 50 years old.

That's right. Everything over 50 (with art, the artists at least have to be dead) is regulated by patrimony laws requiring Italians to declare what they own if they wish to export it. This means many people prefer to remain secretive about what they have, and if it's art, it therefore doesn't circulate. Whatever's buried in the ground automatically belongs to the state, even if the ground happens to be your backyard.

Beautiful concepts, in principle: collective values, shared heritage, cultural integrity over economy.

In practice, in a country where uncollected taxes are now estimated to top €280 billion, or about $401 billion - a reflection, among other things, of Italian doubts about, and lack of identification with, a centralized government - the system relies upon an increasingly aging and perennially underpaid ministry. It is practically unmanageable. It encourages dishonesty and illicit trade; it discourages innovation and outreach. It also stresses conservation - sometimes to a fault.

Only 15 years ago Italian museums agreed to keep their doors open past 2 p.m. A Roman friend was shocked last week to receive a flyer from the Palazzo Massimo, part of the National Museum of Rome, inviting her to "Discover the Massimo." American museums send out these sorts of promotions all the time. Not Italian ones.

In America tax breaks encourage private contributions to public institutions. Italy is only just beginning to set up a limited system for tax breaks but under complicated circumstances that most Italians don't know about or find mysterious. Smuggling art and antiquities out of the country is a constant problem.

Michele Trimarchi, an economist here, shook his head in disgust. "We have a small but noisy cultural establishment, and there is a kind of religion of self-protection on its part," he said. "The large majority of Italians don't actually care about culture. Absolutely not.

"In the United States, you have museums and opera companies that arrange for young people to come for free to encourage new audiences. Here that sort of promotion is blasphemous. Italian museums have no incentive to promote themselves. They are not centers of financial autonomy, because everything they make goes to the central government, so whatever they make will not be reflected in their own financial fortunes."

This is not altogether true either. But it is part of the problem. "And yes," Trimarchi added, "we fail to realize that conservation and promotion are two sides of the same coin." Which they are. In the end, it's an odd failure in a country so dependent on culture for tourist dollars and, in commercial areas like design and fashion, so cutting-edge and adroit at salesmanship.

Back at the Vatican, Paolucci shrugged: "Culture is like our family. Every once in a while a politician comes along and suggests selling off what's in our storage rooms. But it's against our DNA to manage cultural patrimony from an economic perspective. Yes, Italy looks after its patrimony badly because we don't have the resources. So we wait for better times." Asked if he had any idea when they might come, he laughed. "I'm optimistic," he said. "Being here, it's my duty to be."