France and Italy: The Heritage-and-Luxury Model of Cultural Economics

The France and Italy cultural economy model is what most people picture when they think of a country living off its heritage, and the picture is incomplete. In this guide the Kurums Startup team sets out how the two countries measure culture, how state money and luxury money interlock, what museums, cinema and design actually earn, and what the model can and cannot teach other countries. It is part of our Arts & Creative Economy hub and sits with the UK creative industries playbook and our analysis of heritage as an industry.

How do France and Italy measure their cultural economies?

Differently, which is why their headline numbers are not comparable. France’s Ministry of Culture counts the “direct economic weight” of nine cultural branches, a narrow national-accounts measure. Italy’s Symbola-Unioncamere report counts a “cultural and creative productive system” that adds design, software and creative workers in other industries.

The French figure comes from the DEPS publication “Le poids économique direct de la culture en 2024”, released in September 2026. It records €54.1bn of value added across audiovisual, performing arts, advertising, heritage, visual arts, press, books, architecture and arts education, 2.1% of the whole economy, unchanged from 2023. In value terms the sector grew 2.6%, close to the 2.9% for all branches, but in volume it fell 0.5% while the economy grew 1.5%. Performing arts grew 11% in volume, heritage 4%, visual arts 2%; architecture fell 7%, press 6%, books and audiovisual 3% each. Audiovisual remains the largest branch, ahead of performing arts, advertising and heritage.

The Italian figure comes from the 2026 edition of “Io sono cultura” by Fondazione Symbola, Unioncamere and the Tagliacarne research centre, covering 2025. It counts €115.8bn of value added, up 3.3%, equal to 5.7% of the national economy, and 1.54 million workers (5.7% of employment, up 1.7%). Of that, “core culture” is €66.8bn and “embedded creatives” (designers, architects and communicators employed outside cultural firms) almost €49bn. The report also estimates a multiplier: each euro of cultural value added activates 1.7 euros elsewhere, lifting the total mobilised to around €310bn, or 15.4% of GDP.

If the French figure were widened to the Italian definition it would be of a similar order of magnitude; if the Italian one were narrowed to the French definition it would fall to roughly 2-3% of GDP. The lesson for anyone comparing countries is to check whether software, design and advertising are inside the perimeter. In the Italian core, software and video games alone are €18.6bn (27.8%), the largest component, followed by publishing at €11.5bn and architecture and design at €11.2bn.

How does the French state finance culture?

Through a culture ministry budget of roughly €4.5bn, a much larger sum of local-authority spending, levy-funded agencies such as the CNC for cinema, public broadcasting, and tax expenditures including the 60% mécénat deduction and film tax credits. The state sets the frame; regions and cities pay for much of the delivery.

The Ministry of Culture’s own budget covers national museums, heritage, the national theatres and operas, and grants to the arts. Local authorities (regions, départements and communes) together spend more on culture than the ministry does, funding conservatoires, libraries, municipal theatres and festivals. This decentralised base is why France has a dense regional network of national drama centres, scènes nationales and art centres that date back to André Malraux’s ministry in the 1960s and the Lang years of the 1980s.

Cinema is financed separately through the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), which collects levies on cinema tickets, broadcasters, streaming platforms and video, and redistributes them. The CNC’s 2025 bilan reports €772.4m of support, including €315.5m for cinema and €283.0m for audiovisual, 290 approved French films, and the extension of investment obligations to Netflix, Amazon and Disney+, which must now spend a share of their French revenue on French and European works. Export flows for French audiovisual content were €1.3bn in 2024, down 10.2%, with film export receipts of €116.4m.

The 2025 cinema numbers show the strain. Admissions fell 14.0% to 156.2 million, the number of distinct cinema-goers fell 2.3% to 40.9 million, and French films held a 37.9% market share. That is still the highest admissions figure of any European market and a better domestic share than any other EU country, but it is a long way from the 213 million admissions of 2019. Our article on box-office economics goes through why the exhibition recovery stalled.

How does Italy turn heritage into revenue?

Through state museums that collected €382m of ticket income from 60.9 million visitors in 2024, a tourism economy that heritage anchors, and reforms since 2014 that gave major museums autonomous directors and budgets. The Colosseum park alone passed €100m of ticket sales.

The Ministry of Culture’s annual ranking of state sites for 2024 shows the Colosseum archaeological park (Colosseum, Forum, Palatine, Domus Aurea) at 14.7 million visitors and €101.9m in revenue, up almost 20% and 28% respectively; the Uffizi Galleries at 5.3 million visitors and €61.9m (revenue up 28%); Pompeii at 4.3 million and €55.3m; and the Pantheon at 4.1 million visitors and €14.7m in its first full year of paid entry. Total state-museum attendance of 60.85 million was up 5% on 2023 and above pre-pandemic levels, with revenue up 23% from €313m.

These numbers are the fruit of the 2014 Franceschini reform, which turned the thirty or so largest museums and parks into autonomous institutions with internationally recruited directors, their own budgets and the right to retain ticket income. Before 2014 the Uffizi’s takings went to the Treasury; after it, the museum could raise prices, extend hours and invest in its own galleries. The debate about over-tourism in Florence, Venice and Rome is in part a debate about the success of this reform.

Private money enters through the Art Bonus, introduced in 2014, which grants a 65% tax credit on donations to public cultural heritage and performing-arts institutions. The Ministry of Culture’s December 2025 statement records €1,144.6m raised cumulatively from over 50,000 donors to 2,854 beneficiary institutions across 7,947 published projects. Its weakness, flagged by the ministry itself, is geography: most of the money goes to northern institutions, and the Mezzogiorno lags. Italy also runs a 40% film tax credit that has made Rome’s Cinecittà a competitive location for international production.

Why do luxury groups fund museums, and what do they get?

Because art patronage raises brand equity, secures access to institutions and, under French and Italian tax law, costs a fraction of the headline sum. LVMH’s Fondation Louis Vuitton, Kering and the Pinault Collection, Fondazione Prada and the Agnellis’ Pinacoteca are brand assets as much as philanthropy.

The French mechanism is the 2003 Aillagon law, which allows companies to deduct 60% of cultural donations from corporate tax (up to a ceiling tied to turnover), with a 90% rate for contributions towards works classified as national treasures. Le Monde’s 2025 investigation into Bernard Arnault, summarised by USA Art News, calculated that LVMH’s €43m outlay to buy Gustave Caillebotte’s “Partie de bateau” for the Musée d’Orsay cost the group €4.3m after deductions, and argued that in return LVMH brands rented museum and palace spaces at favourable rates for shows and events. Arnault’s reply was that the foundation was built under a law passed by parliament at the culture minister’s request, that the mechanism is open to anyone, and that if lawmakers object they should repeal it.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton, which opened in 2014 in a Frank Gehry building in the Bois de Boulogne, is the most visible result: its exhibitions regularly draw more than a million visitors and its retrospectives of Basquiat, Rothko and Pop art anchor Paris’s autumn season. François Pinault, Arnault’s rival and Kering’s founder, answered with the Bourse de Commerce, a Tadao Ando-converted grain exchange in central Paris opened in 2021, after earlier installing his collection at the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice. The competition between the two collectors is a standing feature of the Paris art market and one reason the city has regained ground against London since Brexit.

In Italy the pattern is the same with a Milanese accent. Fondazione Prada, in a Rem Koolhaas-designed complex opened in 2015, is Prada’s cultural face; the Agnelli family’s Pinacoteca sits on top of the Lingotto in Turin; Fondazione Trussardi, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and the Fendi-sponsored restorations of Rome’s Trevi Fountain (€2.2m, 2015) and the Bulgari restoration of the Spanish Steps (€1.5m, 2016) are the same logic applied to monuments. For luxury groups whose products sell on heritage and craft, visible cultural patronage is a marketing cost that the state subsidises. Our article on corporate sponsorship of museums looks at what brands measure in return.

What do the big institutions earn and cost?

The Louvre drew 9 million visitors in 2025, up from 8.7 million, and Paris’s monuments set records, with the Eiffel Tower at 6.75 million and the CMN network above 12 million. Italian state museums took €382m in 2024. Yet most flagship institutions still rely on the state for a large share of their budgets.

The Louvre’s 2025 attendance of 9 million, reported by The Local France in January 2026, came despite strikes and a 2025 heist that exposed security gaps. Roughly three-quarters of its visitors are foreign. President Macron’s “Nouvelle Renaissance” plan, announced in January 2025, proposes a new entrance, a dedicated Mona Lisa room and a higher ticket price for non-EU visitors from 2026 to fund works estimated at several hundred million euros. The museum’s operating budget is around €300m, of which the state grant covers roughly a third; ticketing, the Louvre Abu Dhabi licence (worth close to €1bn over the contract), sponsorship and retail cover the rest.

Across Paris, the Centre des monuments nationaux (Arc de Triomphe, Sainte-Chapelle, Conciergerie, Panthéon and others) passed 12 million visitors in 2025, the Eiffel Tower added 450,000 to reach 6.75 million, Notre-Dame welcomed about 11 million in its first year after reopening, and the fourteen Paris Musées sites drew 5.17 million. These numbers are the base of a tourism economy in which the Paris region alone receives around 50 million visitors a year.

Italy’s equivalent figures are more concentrated in a few sites and more dependent on day-trip tourism. The Colosseum’s €101.9m and the Uffizi’s €61.9m are large sums for museums, but the Italian state’s total cultural budget is comparable to France’s and spread across far more sites: Italy has more UNESCO World Heritage listings (60) than any other country and thousands of churches, villas and archaeological areas that earn nothing and cost money to maintain. The pricing and access debates in Venice (a day-tripper fee since 2024) and Florence are the operational side of that imbalance. Our analysis of how museums make money covers the admission-versus-subsidy question in detail.

How do the two countries compare on policy and outcomes?

France spends more public money per head and runs stronger sector institutions (CNC, national theatres, public broadcasting); Italy has more heritage, a more effective patronage tax credit and a bigger design and fashion industry. Neither has built a games or streaming export sector on the Korean or British scale.

The policy divergence is visible in what each country counts as its growth sector. In Italy, software and video games grew 5.8% in 2025 and architecture and design 5.9%, while heritage fell 2.4%: the Italian system is shifting from its monuments to its studios, and Milan (10.1% of provincial value added from culture) is now a design and media capital first and an art city second. In France, the growth came from performing arts (up 11%) and heritage, while press, books and architecture fell; the French system remains anchored in subsidised creation and tourism.

Türkiye sits between the two models in an instructive way. Its cultural economy, measured by TÜİK at ₺408bn in 2024 (about $12.4bn, 0.9% of GDP), is almost evenly split between public spending (49.1%) and household spending, with heritage the largest public line at 17.7%. Istanbul’s private foundations (İKSV, the Koç, Sabancı and Eczacıbaşı families) play the role LVMH and Prada play in Paris and Milan, funding the biennial and the city’s museums. What Türkiye lacks is the tax architecture: there is no mécénat deduction or Art Bonus equivalent that makes corporate patronage systematically cheap, which is one reason private cultural investment there depends on a handful of family groups.

What can other countries learn from the heritage-and-luxury model?

Three things: give major museums autonomy and let them keep ticket income, build a levy-funded audiovisual agency on the CNC pattern, and use a generous, simple tax credit to pull corporate money into heritage. And one caution: a model built on tourism and patronage does not by itself create exportable content industries.

The Italian museum reform is the most portable lesson because its results are measurable and recent. Within a decade of giving the Uffizi, Pompeii and the Colosseum their own directors and budgets, revenue rose faster than attendance, conservation spending rose, and the sites began to behave like institutions with strategies rather than ticket offices. Countries with large state-owned heritage estates, including Türkiye, Greece, Egypt and Mexico, can apply the same change without new money.

The French CNC lesson is the second. A levy on every window (cinema tickets, broadcasters, streamers, video) that recycles into production and exhibition creates a financing base insulated from annual budget politics. The 2021 extension of investment obligations to Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ shows the system can absorb new distributors; the 2025 admissions decline shows it cannot by itself hold audiences in cinemas.

The patronage lesson is the third and the most contested. The 60% French deduction and 65% Italian credit have moved large sums into culture at a fiscal cost that critics, from Le Monde to the French Court of Auditors, argue is poorly tracked. Transparency about who benefits, and caps that prevent a few groups from dominating, are the conditions under which the mechanism is defensible. The caution is that none of this builds a K-pop or a games industry. France’s and Italy’s video-game sectors (Ubisoft, Digital Bros, Milestone) grew despite, not because of, the cultural policy frame, and both countries export far less content per head than Korea or the UK. Heritage and luxury are a strong base; they are not a complete playbook.

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