Otranto: the Ministry of Culture spends €1.8 million on seventeen nights of light shows. The three richest assignments made without a tender stop just below the threshold

6 November 2026, 16:13

From 11 September, for seventeen evenings, the castle, the cathedral and four other monuments in Otranto served as a screen for a video mapping show, an animated story of light projected onto the stone, devoted to the Ottoman siege of the town in the fifteenth century. The Ministry of Culture paid for it and its regional office, the Regional Directorate of National Museums of Puglia, signed the contracts: €1.8 million, VAT included, or about €106,000 per evening, in front of a few hundred spectators. In Metz, in France, a festival of the same kind, with more works and in more locations, cost a fifth of that figure per day.

One rule is enough to understand how that money was spent. The public procurement code allows a public office to choose a service provider on its own, without a tender, if the contract is worth less than €140,000; above that figure it must compare several bids and take the best. Of the nine assignments for the show, eight were awarded directly, and the three largest among these are worth €134,050, to the French company of the artistic director, and €135,000 each to two Rome-based firms: one designed the animations, the other handled communication. Making the show known therefore cost, to the cent, as much as designing it, and both assignments stayed exactly five thousand euros below the limit above which someone could have asked for less.

Otranto, however, is only the best-lit example. In the report presented to the Chamber of Deputies on 21 April 2026, the National Anti-Corruption Authority, ANAC, counted the service and supply contracts awarded without a tender in the last five thousand euros before the threshold: there were 1,549 in 2021 and 13,879 in 2025. In four years, it seems, thousands of public offices discovered at the same moment that what they needed cost just under the limit. The Authority, which is not fond of adjectives, writes that behind this practice "waste, opportunism and artificial splitting often lurk", and points out that almost nineteen purchases out of twenty now take place without any comparison.

Nobody has written down the bill for that band alone, yet a multiplication is enough: even counting every contract at the lowest value, in 2025 at least €1.87 billion changed hands without any competitor being able to propose a different price. Taxpayers paid it, through public budgets; the companies and professionals chosen by the offices collected it. When nobody competes, the only price the administration knows is the one proposed by the supplier it has already decided to call.

The threshold, ANAC itself warns, also disarms those who would like to say no: below that value an honest official, if someone puts pressure on them, can no longer reply that the law requires them to compare several bids. The corrective decree to the code, approved at the end of 2024, left "insidious fault lines", according to the Authority; changing the threshold is a matter for the government and Parliament, and so far it has stayed where it was.

For the light show, the only contract put out to tender was the supply of the equipment; whoever had to decide what to project, and whoever had to make it known, the office chose on its own.

This article was prompted by a news item published in il Fatto Quotidiano on 5 November 2026.