OPENCIVTECHFrom 2008 to today: €8.6 million for culture and tourism. And the results?
Eighteen years of culture, events and tourism reconstructed from budgets, records and press reports: how much it cost and what results from it. The part that is missing is the results.
Two hundred and twenty dates, no cost given
This summer Atri announced “Atri Cultura in Eventi 2026”: over 220 events from 1 July to 13 September, with concerts by Enrico Ruggeri, Povia and Massimo Di Cataldo, the Duchi d'Acquaviva festival, “Atri a Tavola”, and the big feast on 14 August. Mayor Piergiorgio Ferretti presented it as confirming Atri as Abruzzo's cultural capital. Deputy mayor Domenico Felicione praised its quality and range.
The press release does not say how much it costs. It does not say how many people came to previous editions. It does not say how many stayed overnight in Atri. And this is not an isolated case: after reconstructing eighteen years of budgets, we do not find in any public document we consulted a single result indicator for the Municipality's cultural and tourism spending.
The question of this dossier is simple. Over eighteen years the Municipality has committed a significant sum for a town of ten thousand people. Has that money built a brand, an “Atri brand” of value? With the public records we found, it is not possible to answer.
Continuity. The whole chronology of this dossier concerns the same political area, in government in Atri since 2008: mayor Gabriele Astolfi (2008-2018, re-elected in 2013 with the list “La Nuova Sfida”, with Piergiorgio Ferretti as deputy mayor), then Ferretti as mayor (elected in 2018 with “Atri La Sfida Continua”, in continuity of majority according to press reports; his 2023 re-election was annulled by the Council of State and a commissioner administration followed, until the elections of 8-9 June 2024, again won by Ferretti). This is context for reading the timing and the responsibilities, not a judgement on the people involved.
Read also. This dossier runs alongside two others: “From €3.5 to €12.6 million”, which reconstructs the Municipality's deficit and Recovery Plan, and “What time does the Licorice Museum in Atri open?”. The first tells the account; this one tells what results from the spending on culture and tourism.
Eight million six hundred thousand euros
From 2008 to 2025 the Municipality committed €8,616,322 for culture and tourism (€10.3 million at 2025 prices): €478 thousand a year, almost €45 per resident, every year. The figures are the official ones from the General Accounting Office (BDAP), which match, year by year, the final accounts published by the Municipality. A “commitment” is the sum the authority binds itself to spend, not money already paid. Of these €8.6 million, €1.13 million are European and regional funds for a single building-renovation project (see 2021-2022 below).
The trajectory is clear. Spending was already almost halved by 2013. From 2016 on, excluding 2022, it hovers between €200 and €420 thousand. Meanwhile Atri lost over fourteen hundred residents. A strong local brand can also attract people to live there: here, residents have fallen. The loss of residents has many causes and cannot be attributed to cultural policy alone, but it is the fact any judgement on the “brand” has to reckon with.
The 2022 peak has a name: the “Doganella d'Abruzzo”
In 2022 spending rises to €1,212,007. It is not a promotional campaign. In the final accounts, €916,073.10 were committed under Mission 05, Programme 02, in the item “Contributions to investments”, with zero euros paid during the year. In 2021, under the same item, there were another €209,375.26. The sum, €1,125,448.36, is exactly the amount the Abruzzo Region awarded in April 2021 to the project “Sulle vie della Doganella d'Abruzzo”: four Municipalities (Atri as lead partner, with Crognaleto, Montefino and Elice) and funding from the 2014-2020 Rural Development Programme for basic services in rural areas. The Municipality itself confirms this in a determination of June 2025.
| Year | Commitments 2021-2022 | Paid on those contributions | Still owed at year end |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | €209,375 | €0 | €209,375 |
| 2022 | €916,073 | €0 | €1,125,448 |
| 2023 | - | €132,418 | €993,030 |
| 2024 | - | €394,299 | €598,731 |
| 2025 | - | €558,723 | €40,008 |
The question of who benefited from those €916 thousand has an answer in the records: they were not a grant to an outside body. The Municipality of Atri, as lead partner, directly contracted and paid for the companies' works, including on the partner municipalities' buildings, and recorded them as “contributions to investments to Municipalities”, including the ones on its own building, the former covered market. This is shown by an act of 15 October 2024, where the same accounting code covers the payment to the firm building in Atri. The pace of payments follows the building sites: tenders that failed, works awarded in 2022, a contract terminated in 2024 and resumed. The work was inaugurated in 2025.
And the money? The Municipality states that the work is “built entirely with regional funding”, with municipal co-funding of €1,326.65. The account of cultural spending must therefore be corrected: over €1.1 million of the €8.6 million committed is not the Municipality's own spending, nor culture in the strict sense, but European and regional funds for a building-renovation project. Without it, the Municipality's own spending over eighteen years is about €7.5 million.
Part of that project is the Museum of Licorice and Ancient Traditions, Atri's flagship product. It appears in the title of the works up to June 2025; in the later documents we found, it no longer appears. We reconstruct it, act by act, in a dossier of its own: “What time does the Licorice Museum in Atri open?”.
In September 2026, with the Recovery Plan under way, the Municipality advanced €30,000 in cash for the Atri Music Festival 2026, while waiting for the Region to disburse the funds (a partnership with the GAL Gran Sasso Laga, Giunta resolution no. 130 of 05/06/2026; determinations 902 and 903 of 15/09/2026, with no CIG tender code). This is not an irregularity: it is a temporary financial exposure that falls on the municipal budget.
A note of fairness. Our archive of contract lists is partial: it mainly holds the larger awards. What we do not find is not necessarily non-existent. That is why we are requesting the records.
The theatre: an account that can be read
The Municipal Theatre is the only cultural item for which the Municipality publishes an account: in 2025, expenses of €116,875.77 and revenue of €91,075.96, a coverage of 77.93%. The rest, almost €26 thousand, is paid by the budget. That is not a bad result for a provincial theatre. But we know it only because the Municipality was required to demonstrate it for the financial Recovery Plan. The cost of individual seasons, the number of spectators and the artistic director's fee are not published.
Here too, the figures do not match. On 14 September 2026 the Giunta approves the agreement with the Fondazione Tercas to rebuild it: the act shows three different figures (maximum contribution €20,000, economic framework €19,520, final allocation €19,250) and no CIG or CUP code. Two days later, with an emergency budget variation approved by the Giunta, €19,520 come in for stage maintenance: the variation must be ratified by the Council.
Culture in the account of the Recovery Plan
The two should be read together, but not confused: cultural spending does not explain the deficit. In the dossier on the Recovery Plan, the deficit is reconstructed act by act: an extraordinary reassessment from 2015, a calculation method from 2020, operating deficits from 2021-2023 and, in 2024, the write-off of €8,452,660.02 of old receivables. None of these layers is attributed, by the records, to cultural spending.
The proportions, from the data in the two dossiers (calc.): in 2025 current spending on culture and tourism was €230,882.06, 2.5% of the €9,251,652.27 of current spending committed by the Municipality. The two cultural measures the Plan quantifies (€21,000 and €12,000 a year, €33,000 in all) are worth about a seventh of that spending. The Plan's fixed instalment, €901,258.46 a year from 2028 to 2035, is almost four times the entire 2025 current cultural spending: zeroing out culture would not close the account. The question, then, is not how much culture is funded but whether, while the Plan asks for much larger sacrifices, we know what the money that is spent produces. That is the question of this whole dossier.
Then there is the cash. At the end of 2025 the cash fund was at €0.00 and the treasury advance not returned was €1,987,076.86 (dossier on the deficit). Against that backdrop, the Municipality advanced the €30,000 for the Atri Music Festival mentioned above: the regional refund is expected, but until it arrives, the advance weighs on the cash. We are asking for the date.
The account of the visitors that is missing
A brand is not measured by events: it is measured by who arrives, stays and returns. The official figure we have, on the accommodation supply, from ISTAT, is modest: from 2008 to 2024 bed places go from 188 to 325; since 2010 there has been a single hotel, with 102 beds. The jump to 477 in 2025 depends on 31 rented flats entering the statistics: it is not growth.
We have not found the presences, that is, actual overnight stays. We found no museum admissions, no theatre audience figures, no tourist-office contacts, no survey of event visitors. The Municipality does not even have a tourist tax: in the Recovery Plan it is zero for every year. And in the budget, tourism, Mission 07, is at zero euros in 2025 and in the 2026-2028 forecasts.
The 2026-2028 planning document lists among the goals still to achieve: “creating a distinctive, recognisable brand”, a “single ticket”, a “centralised online platform” for events, “tourist packages” with operators, a single “Events Authority”. These are the foundations of a local brand. In the document, they are still written as goals yet to be achieved.
Seven questions to the Municipality
- What happened to the Museum of Licorice and Ancient Traditions funded by the “Sulle vie della Doganella d'Abruzzo” project? When does it open, who runs it, and how much did the museum alone cost?
- How much does “Atri Cultura in Eventi 2026” cost, item by item, and how many people took part?
- Why did the Municipality advance €30,000 for the Atri Music Festival 2026, for what expenses, and when will the regional refund arrive?
- How many presences and how many admissions has it recorded every year since 2008? If it does not measure them, why not?
- Why is Mission 07 “Tourism” at zero if the Municipality presents tourism as a primary resource?
- Who are the beneficiaries of cultural contributions, year by year since 2008, with what criteria and what accounting?
- When will the single ticket, the events platform and the single authority promised in the planning document be delivered?
How we would use those funds
This is not a polemical exercise. If we had had the same money, about €480 thousand a year, we would have allocated it like this, with an indicator for every item.
| Function | Share | Per year | What it funds | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reception and product | 25% | €120 thousand | opening hours of sites, guides, single ticket, signage, information in more languages | admissions, opening hours, satisfaction |
| Heritage | 20% | €96 thousand | maintenance and restoration, always with co-funding (Region, foundations, Art Bonus) | outside euros for every municipal euro |
| Theatre and season | 20% | €96 thousand | artistic direction, subscriptions, schools | spectators, subscribers, cost coverage |
| Two off-season flagship events | 15% | €72 thousand | two events of Atri's own, from October to March, in a single calendar | overnight stays, audience from outside |
| Measured promotion | 10% | €48 thousand | campaigns with a dedicated page, packages, agreements with the coast | bookings and visits generated |
| Grants by call | 6% | €29 thousand | small association projects, with a public call and a report | projects, audience, reports delivered |
| Measurement and open data | 4% | €19 thousand | counting admissions, visitor surveys, publishing the data | indicators published every year |
Five rules: no initiative without a numeric target; no event without a published total cost; no grant that renews itself automatically; an action that after two years does not improve its own indicator loses its budget; every year a report of a few pages, including the failures. We do not promise what the return would have been: national agencies' return-on-investment reports are not comparable to a municipality this size. We promise that it would have been possible to know.
The next ten years (2027-2036)
The Municipality is under the Recovery Plan until 2039, and culture today has €200-260 thousand a year (€176 thousand forecast for 2027-2028). Starting rule: no new spending without coverage. What exists is reorganised, and outside resources are sought, as shown by the European TIDE project on sustainable tourism (Interreg Italy-Croatia programme, €136,930, 100% funded by European and national funds, no cost to the Municipality: Giunta resolution no. 177 of 10/09/2026).
| Phase | What is done | Result to show |
|---|---|---|
| 2027 · Measure and reorganise | Spending and grants in open format. People counters and ticketing at cultural sites. Request to the Region and ISTAT for the municipal presence figures. A single calendar. A public call for grants, with a mandatory report. | The first picture: presences, admissions, cost per event. About 4% of the budget is reallocated. |
| 2028-2029 · Build the product | Single ticket. Reopening of the Ethnographic Museum. Routes: the Roman theatre, Atri Sotterranea, the Calanchi. Packages with accommodation providers, in a network of operators. | A purchasable product: “Atri in a day”, “Weekend in Atri”. |
| 2030-2032 · Extend the season | Two flagship events in autumn and winter. Schools and artist residencies. Candidacy for the European Charter for Sustainable Tourism. Links with the coast. | More presences from October to March. |
| 2033-2036 · Consolidate | Independent evaluation. A steering group between organisers and operators. Strategy review. | A recognisable brand, measured, not just declared. |
Our proposal: bookings without commissions, with a network of operators
Tourism in Atri has a practical problem. A tour operator who wants to bring forty people has to find a hotel, and there is only one, with 102 beds. The rest of the supply is made up of fifty-three small facilities (B&Bs, farm stays, holiday homes) that do not present themselves as a system. For a tour operator, this means dealing with dozens of separate contacts.
OpenCivTech has already built a working prototype of incomingatri, to be handed over to a competent legal body. It works like this:
- Fair-rotation showcase. Facilities appear in turn: whoever has been shown less moves up, with no sponsorships. A public counter shows everyone how many times each has been featured.
- Group requests. The tour operator states people, dates and radius. The network proposes how to split them among nearby facilities and forwards the request to the operators, who confirm or decline.
- Operator area. Room calendar, read-only import of the portals' calendars, replies to requests. The price is always and only set by the operator.
- Open data. Capacity, requests and distribution, with no personal data: for the first time the Municipality would have a real figure on demand.
Rules already built in: the CIN code compulsory on every listing; no price agreed between operators (risk of a cartel); no commission; no payment or package sale by the platform; the term “albergo diffuso” is not used, because it has a specific meaning under regional law.
The prototype is not public and uses fictitious facilities with real ISTAT totals. To become a service it needs a legal body (a business network, consortium, cooperative or association), a shared set of rules, 10-12 participating operators and a partner licensed for packages and transport. Cost to the Municipality: none. Benefit: a source of data on tourist demand, which is missing today.
Who held which portfolios
The portfolios of Domenico Felicione, as they appear in the sources:
| When | Role and portfolios | Source |
|---|---|---|
| June 2013 | Senior councillor in the Astolfi bis executive: public works, environment and ecology, public green spaces, roads, expropriations, vehicle fleet, maintenance of buildings and systems, public housing, school buildings, workplace safety, strategic plan. In that executive culture, tourism, museums and libraries belonged to Umberto Italiani, EU policies to Giammarco Marcone, finance and assets to Alessia Faiazza; the deputy mayor was Piergiorgio Ferretti | Il Centro, 9 June 2013 |
| April 2017 | Councillor for culture | Cityrumors, April 2017 |
| April 2021 | Councillor for public works and EU policies | Cityrumors, 20 April 2021 |
| December 2025 | Deputy mayor | Giunta resolution no. 228 of 29 December 2025 |
| Today | Deputy mayor. Portfolios, as written on the official page: “Cultura - Turismo - Musei e Biblioteche – Riserve naturali - PNRR Opere Pubbliche cultura e turismo – Educazione e Istruzione pubblica – Servizi scolastici (infanzia minori e diversamente abili) – Trasporto scolastico” (culture, tourism, museums and libraries, nature reserves, NRRP public works for culture and tourism, education, school services, school transport) | Official page of the Municipality, consulted on 20 September 2026 (no appointment date) |
The portfolios of the mayor Piergiorgio Ferretti, as written on the official page of the Municipality (consulted on 20 September 2026, no appointment date): “Lavori Pubblici - Personale - Servizi Generali - Protezione civile – Viabilità – Sanità – Edilizia Scolastica – Comunicazione istituzionale” (public works, personnel, general services, civil protection, roads, health, school buildings, institutional communication).
For the other years (2008-2012, 2014-2016, 2018-2020, 2022-2024) we have not found the portfolios: the appointment decrees are among the documents we are requesting from the Municipality.
Sources and method
- BDAP - General Accounting Office: final accounts 2008-2025 of the Municipality of Atri (commitments, payments, appropriations). The 2025 final accounts and the 2026-2028 budget published by the Municipality. ISTAT: population and accommodation supply. 2025 current spending, deficit, cash and treasury advance: 2025 final accounts (Council resolution no. 12 of 30/04/2026) and the Recovery Plan, as cited in the dossier on the Recovery Plan.
- Municipality of Atri: Recovery Plan 2025-2039; update note to the 2026-2028 planning document (DUP); Giunta resolutions no. 130, 177, 181, 184 (2026); determinations no. 902 and 903 of 15/09/2026; contract lists (Law 190/2012).
- Press and press releases: “Atri Cultura in Eventi 2026” (Giornale di Montesilvano); press releases of the Municipality of Atri; Fondazione Tercas; Province of Teramo.
- Method: only public records and data; no judgement on people; where a figure is missing, we say so. “Not found” means it does not appear in the public documents consulted as of 20 September 2026. Figures not verified on documents were not used.
Last updated: 27 September 2026 (data collected up to 20 September). Right of reply: the answers of the Municipality, the councillor's office and the organisers will be published in full. The dossier is also available in Italian, which is the reference text.