For 15 years at least, Italian politicians and cultural commentators have been complaining that Italy’s museums are backward compared with those in the US and UK: often grubby, sometimes careless with their collections, badly labelled, unimaginatively displayed, with negligible attempts at outreach, they are, with very few exceptions, incapable of attracting a large and wide public.

Every now and again they appoint a foreigner, such as James Bradburne, in the hope of getting a bit of that magical know-how, and then they get rid of him or her in humiliating, destructive and unprofessional ways that in the UK or US would be inconceivable.

There are three reasons why this happens. The first is that museums are seen as political pawns, to be played with as part of local power games. The second is that there is a widespread belief that one should be able to make money directly out of museums and exhibitions, and the third is the misconception that Italian museums are lagging because they are run by scholars and that their substitution by managers would solve all the problems.

The reality, though, is that no fully functioning museums make a profit, almost no exhibitions do so, and not a single art museum in the UK or US is run by a managerial figure. The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a specialist in tapestries, the director of the Tate is a contemporary art expert; even the J. Paul Getty Trust, a huge cultural complex with a $4.2bn endowment, has appointed an art historian as its third president and chief executive after two who were administrators.

These directors hold the power, while managerial figures of a lower rank assist them. The boards are not there to meddle in executive matters but to guarantee the security of the collections, approve major expenditure, raise money, give advice and generally support the director.

Three recent Italian case histories

The directorship of Turin’s Museo Egizio

In 2005 the Egyptologist Eleni Vassilika, a US-UK citizen, was appointed director of the Museo Egizio in Turin when it changed status from being a State body to a trustee museum, the first of its kind in Italy. Its very large board, representing local government and the bank foundations who were partially financing it, disagreed about whether they wanted a scholar-director or not, the compromise being to appoint Vassilika for a two-year contract, then a pair of one-year contracts, an impossibly short time for any director to implement any radical changes. They undermined her yet more by reconfirming her only a month or two before the end of each contract. The chairman of the board, Alain Elkann, a member of the influential Agnelli family, intervened in the management on an almost daily basis. She was also subject to vexatious limitations, such as having to ask permission from the disgruntled state officials, the superintendency whenever she needed to move an exhibit; she often had to wait weeks for a reply. But from being a dirty, badly labelled museum with deplorable environmental care for the collections and fewer than 300,000 visitors a year, Vassilika turned the museum into an institution that lived up to international curatorial standards and attracted 540,000 visitors a year. Despite this, after a change in the chairmanship of the board, in 2013 she was told that she had to take part in an open competition for her job. It was then given to Christian Greco, an Italian Egyptologist at Leiden University. Vassilika has gone on to be the curatorial director of the National Trust, which is in effect the directorship of the largest diffuse museum in the UK.

The chairmanship of the Venice civic museums

In 2010 the outgoing mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari, appointed David Landau to be president of the board of its important civic museums. Landau, who lives in Venice, is Israeli-born but educated in Italy, co-author of the key book on Italian Renaissance prints, a highly successful entrepreneur, former trustee of London's National Gallery and then chairman of its subsidiary commercial company, so he was uniquely well qualified for this position. Three months later the succeeding mayor, Giorgio Orsoni (who resigned last month after being arrested for accepting illegal party contributions) sacked him by sending the local police to serve him notice. Landau’s sin: to have looked too closely into decades of poor administration and tried to stop an exhibitions policy that consisted essentially in renting out the galleries to whomever could pay the fees. Despite this slap in the face, he and his wife have gone on to give the city Le Stanze del Vetro, its only dedicated space for exhibitions of 20th-century and contemporary glass, which they finance entirely themselves.

The directorship of Turin’s Castello di Rivoli museum of contemporary art

In this case, local politics managed to make a mockery of an international consultation process, waste the time of those interviewed for the job and mess up the leadership of a museum that had acquired an international reputation, reducing it to local significance. The retirement of Ida Gianelli, the very able director of this museum, ended a creative partnership with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, her deputy, who had been appointed the curator of the 2012 Documenta. Christov-Bakargiev stayed on in 2009 to run the search for a new director, asking numerous figures such as Nicholas Serota of the Tate and Udo Kittelmann, the director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, to propose candidates. A number, both Italian and foreign, were interviewed, and Jens Hoffmann, then the director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, was chosen. But Gianni Oliva, the head of cultural affairs for the regional government of Piedmont, which provided €4m a year for the Castello di Rivoli, insisted that his protegé, the director of the Turin fair Artissima, Andrea Bellini (who had not been nominated by the expert advisers), should be appointed. The board announced a dual directorship, but Hoffmann withdrew, saying that the terms of the job had changed from those advertised. Beatrice Merz, the head of the local Fondazione Merz, took his place and remains acting director, although her contract ran out at the end of 2012; Andrea Bellini left in June 2012. An attempt in 2013 to find a new director failed due “to a lack international candidates”, as the appointment board explained. Christov-Bakargiev, now one the world's most distinguished curators, said: “The Castello di Rivoli board never suggested I join the board or remain connected to the museum in any way. Had they done so, I might have considered putting in for the directorship myself”.