Distribution of museums with a website in Italy 2020, by website type

How museums in Italy are responding to the challenges of the digital era? In 2020, 85 percent of Italian museums had a presence online. However, only 47 percent of these institutions owned a website. Thus, museums that were online but did not owned a website relied either on singles pages or entire sites within institutional websites.

Italian museums on social media

From 2017 to 2020, the share of Italian museums having a social media account increased steadily. As of 2020, roughly 76 percent of institutions claimed to have a Facebook account, while less than a half of them stated to have an Instagram profile. When looking at the average number of posts published on social media by Italian museums, data reveal that Instagram was less used than both Facebook and Twitter from December 2019 to April 2020.

Museums digitalizing their collections

As for the online presence and the use of social media, most museums in Italy digitalized at least part of their collections in 2020. Specifically, 40 percent of these institutions digitalized at least half of their collections in the considered year.