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Telegraph - With all its treasures sold, who will visit Italy? By Malcolm Moore

The story is the same throughout Italy. A combination of incompetent government, lacklustre industry and a general refusal to pay taxes has left a deep scar on the country’s finances. The country’s crushing debts have forced the Bel Paese to pimp its cultural gems to the highest bidders.

In Milan, H&M, a clothing store, bought the right to plaster a 100ft advert starring Madonna on the front of the Duomo during its renovations, to the universal disgust of Catholics.

Rome recently allowed Valentino, a fashion designer, to throw a party around the Ara Pacis, a gleaming white marble altar from 13bc celebrating Augustus’s victories in Spain and France. He also erected a tacky resin temple to showcase his frocks in the middle of the Forum. The city even wanted a company to wrap an advertisement around the outside of the Colosseum, but failed to find a bidder with deep enough pockets. The result is that nine tenths of the building is too decayed to visit.

In Tuscany, a whole hill-top village was sold to a German tourist company to become a holiday camp. Ugly concrete buildings continue to sprout in protected areas and the ironically monikered Heritage Petroleum has bought licences to drill in the Val D’Orcia, one of the world’s most beautiful areas.

It was Silvio Berlusconi, of course, who started the process, after deciding to get as many of Italy’s 3,000 museums and 2,000 archaeological sites as possible off his flailing government’s accounts. He did not stop there. Once he had exploited the big attractions for corporate sponsorship, he then decided to sell off the smaller ones at auction. A valuation was conducted. Italy’s cultural heritage was priced at £1,300 billion.

As his culture minister said at the time: “Italy is like a person with many houses, but also many debts. So we have to look at which houses are dispensable.” The law protecting ancient property was changed and hundreds of buildings, parks and archaeological sites were flogged off.

The effect has been devastating. The ruins where visitors could picnic at the weekend have been closed. The crumbling palazzi where members of the Medici family once poisoned each other have been polished into bland hotels.

Archaeologists and historians are aghast. Petitions have pointed out that the protection of the country’s heritage is enshrined in the Republic’s post-war constitution, and the process is damaging the tourist industry, which now accounts for more than a tenth of the economy.

You know, if these places were in, to pick a place at random, Lybia, Signor Ghaddafi being hardly a paragon of competent governance, the UN and UNESCO would be doing all this for him. If Italy’s got problems, I don’t see how it’s fair that their vastly more important world heritage sights should suffer for it just because they’re European and Christian.