Paper short abstract:

The paper analyze the Italian national politics of heritage in the “UNESCO age”, and the inventories of Intangible Cultural Heritage produced for the inclusion to the UNESCO Representative List. Two cases will be presented: the nominees of the Mediterranean Diet and the Palio of Siena.

Paper long abstract:

In Italy the inventory of so-called "ethnoanthropological heritage", both tangible and intangible has its own specific history within national policies on cultural heritage. These inventories are based on an objectivistic conception of "heritage" (that heritage exists independently of the theoretical framework we employ) and until very recently they had only a very marginal relationship with the communities.

Over the last year, this scenario has changed with the arrival of UNESCO nominees for inclusion in the Representative List, which involved individual communities in defining their intangible heritage. With the increasing number of nominations and to comply with Article 12 of the Convention (Italy ratified the Convention in 2007) that required intangible heritage to be inventoried, the Ministry of Culture (MIBAC) forced the "communities" who proposed nominations to fill out the inventory for their own nominated heritage.

In order to explore the various and oftentimes conflictual dynamics and the diverse "communities" involved, two disparate examples of inventories in "the UNESCO age" will be presented. One is an inventory produced entirely from "on high" as part of a national (and transnational) nomination - the Mediterranean Diet - in which "community", in the UNESCO sense, had no role to play; while the second case represents a very significant instance of grass-roots commissioning of the inventory - the Palio of Siena horse race, whose nomination has had a very complex history.