The Italians of the past created the richest cultural heritage in the world so diverse and fragile, in fact, that the Italians of today are at their wits' end trying to preserve it. The collapse of the House of the Gladiators in Pompeii a week ago was viewed by many as a metaphor for Silvio Berlusconi's Italy: reality's revenge on a party-loving Prime Minister who lives in the here and now with scant regard for either the distant past or the future. Mr Berlusconi and his Culture Minister, Sandro Bondi, believe that Italy's art treasures should pay for themselves. With appropriate promotion and publicity, ticket-paying tourists will flock through the turnstiles, sponsors will finance restoration projects and ancient monuments will be brought back to life as a backdrop to modern cultural activities such as concerts or fashion shows, they argue. To put this philosophy into practice Mr Bondi last year appointed Mario Resca, the former head of McDonald's Italy, to manage the country's 450 museums and archaeological sites on a more profitable basis. Other "supermanagers" are to be brought on board to supplement the scant business sense of the ministry's professional archaeologists and art historians and to spearhead the valorizzazione, or monetisation, of the nation's cultural heritage. Art world professionals have found themselves sidelined by managers from the Civil Protection Department, brought in to tackle emergencies such as Pompeii and licensed to work around the bureaucratic red tape that usually slows construction and restoration. The policy has backfired, however, with most of Italy's major cultural attractions closed yesterday because of a one-day strike over the budget cuts. Critics said that the Government's approach was short-sighted. "The collapse [of the House of Gladiators] has inflicted a terrible wound on Italy's reputation in the field of restoration," said Maria Pia Guermandi, a councillor for the heritage organisation Italia Nostra. "It wasn't just a house that came down but an entire patrimony of credibility." Ms Guermandi said that the emergency commissioners who had overseen restoration work since they were given responsibility for the site two years ago had acted with little sensitivity, operating with excavators and Bobcats on a site "where you should only intervene with a soft brush". The policy of augmenting the number of visitors to the country's best-known sites was also misguided, she said. At the Colosseum, where slabs of plaster plunged to the ground seven months ago, visitors have been given access to a greater area of the monument and there have even been nighttime visits. Mr Resca is also eager that the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, visited by 1.6 million people last year, should do more to challenge the supremacy of the Louvre, which had 8.5 million visitors. "People are looking for short-cuts," Ms Guermandi said. "The Uffizi is one-twentieth the size of the Louvre. It is dirty, smelly and when it rains water runs down the wall in one of the rooms." Mr Bondi, a Berlusconi loyalist who has been criticised for his willingness to accept swingeing cuts to the Culture Ministry's budget, due to go down from 1.4 billion to 1.2 billion next year, has so far resisted calls for his resignation over the Pompeii collapse. He insists that the incident was unforeseeable. However, critics say that the collapse could have been prevented because it was heralded by a series of lesser stability problems in neighbouring buildings, but that the Government had diverted funds from conservation to promotion. The weekly magazine L'Espresso published details yesterday of what it said were non-essential expenditures authorised by the emergency commissioner. They included 51,000 for a visit by the Prime Minister that did not take place. Pietro Guzzo, who was superintendent of Pompeii from 1995 until 2009, said: "It probably wouldn't cost as much as people think to get the site in order. There are the universities and the archaeology schools, such as the British School at Rome, who do great work. With a grand collaborative plan it can be done. It's just a question of method." Archaeologists said that the House of the Gladiators was one of a myriad treasures at risk from under-funding and neglect. They argued that it was time to return to ordinary administration of the country's threatened sites, restoring control to the ministry's professionals. Lists of the monuments at risk included Nero's Golden House in Rome, the dome of Florence's Cathedral, Bologna's twin towers and a host of little-known archaeological sites in southern Italy.