Italy’s cities and museums are increasingly adjusting how visitors experience culture, with a focus on people who are blind or have low vision and on the companions who support them. In Rome, the Associated Press reported one of those shifts through the experience of Michela Marcato, who has been blind since birth and toured the Colosseum during a new push aimed at improving access to the country’s cultural sites.
Marcato and her partially sighted partner walked around the Colosseum on a weeknight after most tourists had left, with a guide introducing site details through touch and other non-visual cues. As she listened to her guide, Marcato traced her fingers over a small souvenir model of the Colosseum, feeling the grooves and rubble-like textures. She said the model helped her understand parts of the building’s design that she had not realized before holding it.
That approach reflects a broader recognition that many tourist sites historically have not been built to include visitors with disabilities. The Associated Press described how people who use wheelchairs can face narrow elevators and doorways, stairs without ramps, and uneven pavements, and it said the country’s accessibility work intensified in 2021 as a condition of receiving European Union pandemic recovery funds.
In Pompeii, the access overhaul has included new signage and visitor tools designed for blind and disabled people, including braille signs, QR-coded audio guides, tactile models and bas-relief replicas of artifacts excavated over the years. In Florence, the Associated Press reported that local officials have produced an accessibility guide for the Uffizi Gallery and other museums, spelling out routes and requirements for visitors and noting where companions are needed—an adaptation aimed at sites such as the Boboli Gardens that are difficult to fully access due to their historic structures.
Alongside architectural and signage improvements, Italy’s tour operators and cultural venues are also changing how experiences are delivered. The Associated Press described the work of the Radici Association, which has led tours in Rome for people with disabilities since 2015, and quoted tour guide Giorgio Guardi on the goal of creating an enjoyable experience that includes companions as part of the group.
The Radici Association’s methods can include adjusting the timing of visits and the way information is communicated. The Associated Press said the association often organizes walking tours at night, when there are fewer crowds and less distracting ambient noise at landmarks, and it said guides may use role-play and tactile substitutes when touching an artwork directly is not possible.
At Rome’s Campo dei Fiori piazza, for example, the statue of Giordano Bruno—burned at the stake during the Inquisition—stands too high to touch. During one nighttime tour, Guardi encouraged clients to assume Bruno’s posture and used the hooded cape to help participants feel the shape and weight of the moment being described. The Associated Press also said visitors who were deaf joined these tours with a sign-language interpreter recounting Bruno’s end.
For deeper changes to how art itself is presented, the Associated Press pointed to the Museo Omero in Ancona, a tactile museum founded in the early 1990s by Aldo and Daniela Grassini, both blind. Named for the blind poet Homer, the museum is publicly funded and has been described as Italy’s only publicly funded tactile museum where all the art is meant to be handled, featuring life-sized replicas of famous works and contemporary art.
Aldo Grassini said that touching artwork is different from looking at it, describing touch as a distinct form of knowledge rather than a substitute. The Associated Press reported his remarks contrasting sight and touch, including his idea that touch offers a different dimension and emotion, and it also described how the museum includes artists who are blind, with examples of sculpture shaped by touch and personal memory.
For visitors like Marcato, that sensory logic extends beyond museums. The Associated Press described how she and her partner, Massimiliano Naccarato, live with a painting of the sea in their apartment; Marcato cannot see it, but the account described how she draws on non-visual experience to enjoy it through sound, smell and the memory of walks taken by the sea.
The Associated Press said the accessibility model is not only about honoring rights for people with disabilities but also about designing experiences that work for tourism more broadly, adding that disabled travelers often bring companions and that economic activity can be tied to inclusive access. For visitors, the end result is a different kind of engagement with Italy’s cultural heritage—one that asks them to slow down, touch what can be touched, and experience art through senses beyond sight.