The Italian Ministry of Culture (MiC) will take part in We Make Future 2026, the international event on artificial intelligence and digital innovation held at BolognaFiere from 24 to 26 June. Across three days, more than a dozen national museums, archives and archaeological parks will present immersive and AI-based projects, with Undersecretary of State Lucia Borgonzoni attending the opening day.
The presence itself is not the story. What matters is how the programme has been organised, and what that structure tells us about where the ministry believes cultural technology should go next.
A programme built around three questions, not three technologies
Rather than grouping projects by tool — VR here, AI there, gamification elsewhere — the ministry has structured its three days around themes: accessibility and inclusion on the first day, major archaeological and monumental sites on the second, gaming and new forms of cultural participation on the third. This is a curatorial choice, not just a scheduling one. It suggests the technology is being framed as a means to specific institutional goals, rather than as an end in itself.
The accessibility day brings together the National Museums of Perugia, the Veneto regional museums directorate, the Royal Residences of the House of Savoy and the Marciana National Library, each addressing a different barrier to access — physical, sensory, geographic. The gaming day closes the event with escape rooms, sign-language video guides and serious games aimed explicitly at reaching new, likely younger, audiences.
The heavyweight sites take centre stage on day two
The middle day is where the institutional weight sits. Pompeii’s augmented reality reconstruction, new digital experiences at the Colosseum Archaeological Park, the Grande Progetto Multimediale at Ostia Antica, a VR route through the Balzi Rossi prehistoric museum in Ventimiglia, and multimedia work at the Certosa di Trisulti are all presented under a single heading: “Great archaeological, monumental sites and immersive reality”.
Grouping Italy’s most visited and most symbolically important sites together, and pairing them explicitly with immersive reality rather than digital heritage in general, is a signal in itself. It positions AR and VR not as experimental add-ons for smaller institutions but as tools that the flagship sites are expected to adopt as standard practice.
A single technology stack for the opening showcase
Throughout the three days, the DiVa department and the IC-VEPP institute run a dedicated stand for “Experience Etruria”, a project developed with CINECA that uses a holographic display and AI-generated characters to guide visitors through Etruscan civilisation. It has already been shown internationally in San Francisco. Its placement as the anchor exhibit — rather than one entry among many — suggests the ministry sees it as a reference case for how it wants future projects to combine hardware, AI content generation and narrative design in a single package.
What this signals about public commissioning priorities
Read together, the three days sketch a fairly coherent set of priorities rather than a scattershot showcase. Accessibility is being treated as a first-order requirement, not an afterthought bolted onto a finished project. Major sites are expected to have an immersive layer as part of their standard visitor offer, not as a temporary exhibition. And gaming mechanics — escape rooms, serious games, interactive storytelling — are being tested deliberately as a way to reach audiences that traditional museum formats do not currently capture.
It is worth noting what the programme does not emphasise as strongly: there is little in the public description about long-term maintenance, running costs, or how these installations will be evaluated once the novelty of a conference stand wears off. That is not a criticism of any single project — it is simply outside the scope of what a showcase event is designed to communicate.
DIVE’s reading
For anyone designing immersive experiences for cultural heritage in Italy, this agenda is useful as a map of institutional appetite, even though none of the projects listed involve DIVE. Three things stand out.
First, the pairing of accessibility with immersive technology is becoming structural rather than optional. Institutions that have historically treated accessibility as a compliance requirement are now presenting it in the same breath as AI and VR. Any organisation planning a cultural project should expect accessibility criteria to be part of the brief from day one, not a feature added after the core experience is built.
Second, the fact that Italy’s most prominent sites — Pompeii, the Colosseum, Ostia — are grouped under “immersive reality” as a stated theme, rather than under generic “digital innovation”, tells us something about expectation levels. When flagship institutions treat AR and VR as part of their baseline offer, the bar for what counts as an adequate visitor experience elsewhere rises with it. Smaller archives and regional museums watching this event will reasonably ask why comparable tools should not be available to them too.
Third, gaming and serious games occupying an entire dedicated day is notable. For years, gamification in cultural settings was treated as a marginal, slightly playful add-on. Positioning it alongside AI and immersive reality as one of three core pillars suggests the ministry sees structured play — escape games, narrative challenges, interactive quests — as a legitimate strategy for audience development, not a gimmick.
The open question, and one this kind of showcase rarely answers, is sustainability: what happens to these installations twelve or twenty-four months after the conference stand is dismantled. Public procurement in Italy has historically been strong on pilot funding and weaker on maintenance budgets. Any institution evaluating a similar project should ask, before signing off on the brief, who updates the content, who fixes the hardware, and who owns the underlying software once the initial contract ends. That question matters more than which headset or engine gets chosen.