The Sponsorship Contract and New Contract Tools for Valorising Cultural Heritage

Scope of the review is the predisposition of contractual tools for protecting and valorising cultural heritage, contributing to the development of the society. Cultural heritage has an economic value, because it becomes one of the most important conditions to attract activities, investments, inhabitants, and tourists. In Italy, public intervention aimed at the protection and valorisation of the national cultural heritage has proven to be inadequate due to cuts in public spending, as well as public administrations’ organizational inefficiencies. In this context, based on the principle of horizontal subsidiarity, under Article 118 paragraph 4 of the Constitution, the involvement of private actors (individuals, businesses, Non-profit-organisation) has increased. Therefore, private sponsorship of cultural heritage, which may take several forms, plays an important role. However, models of public-private partnership (PPP), where the private sector takes on directly the management of the cultural heritage, are less common. They can be related only to the valorisation of the cultural heritage, into the limits set by Article 9 of the Constitution, whereas the protection and preservation of the heritage is reserved only for the public sector. The modifications of the Cultural Heritage’s Code due to d.lgs. 62/2008, caused the almost complete re-writing of sponsorship contract. These variations, together with other recent laws (such as d.l. 91/2013) and legislation in other countries (especially Germany which has a best practice regulation), will be a good example to analyse the main subjects of sponsorship and its use in the context of heritage.