Free Art in Italy!
How much does Italy cost? It's a question people frequently ask. Cost is different for everyone, of course, that's why nobody ever gives with a decent number you can wrap a reasonably flexible mind around. My flights from California to Italy and back will cost about two of those things you stick in your pocket and take out to get annoying phone calls and to read crank emails. Your equivalency may vary.
Then of course you have the lodging, the food, and the entry fees to major attractions and museums. Pretty soon your numbers start to pile up. Before long your expenditures might be equal to the price of a brand new Alfa Romeo Berlina purchaed, say, in 1973 (I bought mine for $5000 back in the heady days of demand-side economics because it was a color called "Le Mans Blue" which nobody liked so the dealer had to whack $500 off the sticker price).
In any case, here's the good thing: if you go long enough, or you plan to return many, many times, then "poof!" the stack of dollars you need to please yourself and "experience" Italy starts to actually decline.
Why? First of all you might loose your taste for 4 course meals cooked by a kitchen slave and his mother every evening. You might rent an apartment and happily chow down on the wealth of gastronomic treasures you find in little shops all around an Italian town of any decent size.
And forget the museums you have to pay for. You begin to wander small towns, seeking out the unusual. Or you figure there's enough public art in Florence to keep you busy for days.
Where is this free art? Let's take the churches and monasteries. They have lots of it. Even tiny churches have managed to get a piece donated or produced by artists seeking financial as well as spiritual gain. And most churches, thousands of them, let you in free.
Ok, so you're thinking it's church art and therefore, since God is supposed to be somehow ashamed of what He created, then there won't be any nudity.
Think again. 
There is nudity, murder, arrows piercing the tender flesh of martyrs, and everything you might see on television these days. (And all before guns made it easy!)
Of course, you might not have expected a snake with a human face.
These old paintings not only have messages from the art to the viewer cleverly included by the artist, but they might also contain messages from the subsequent restorer, also an artist.
Look at the segment of the fresco above. From top of the picture to the crack in the wall the draped material is painted expertly, with a perfect transition between dark and light areas. If you are seeing this on a big enough monitor, below the crack you'll see the cloth painted with uniform short strokes of light and dark. This is the restoring artist telling you, "There was some event that caused this crack and maybe some moisture at the bottom of the wall causing the fresco to completely disappear, so I'm painting it back in so you can see what the original artist intended, but in a way that you can tell it's not the original."
Another place to look for free art is in the communal buildings of a city. For example, the Palazzo del Comune Comune di Pistoia, the "City Hall" of Pistoia in Tuscany is loaded with eye candy for intrepid tourists who've made their way inside.
Of course you can find statuary in parks and squares throughout Italy. But head for small cities like Conversano in Puglia, and you might come across a very inexpensive or free Pinacoteca Civica, or Civic Art Gallery. I mention Conversano because the Pinacoteca is inside the Norman castle and contains the amazing cycle called Gerusalemme Liberata, Jeruselem Liberated, painted by Paolo Finoglio starting in 1640.
You'd dress up the family and go together to see this kind of art in the old days. It was like a night at the theater. You'd all sit by the first picture, and someone old and wise would translate in colorful language the story the picture was telling him, then you'd move on to the next frame until you would have completed the cycle. After, you'd probably head out for a coffee.
And finally, in this day and age we seldom equate Banks with free art, or free anything for that matter. In passing the impressive Liberty style entrance of the venerable Cassa Centrale di Risparmio di Depositi di Firenze we just had to push open the doors and explore. The ground floor is full of men in suits pointing to computer screens--but the upper story was entirely devoted to art. Free art--and get this, just down the street was the venerable Ospedale Santa Maria Nuova, where they were restoring the art while folks prowled the floor waiting to be admitted. See it: Florence: Art in Odd Places.
When in Italy, don't pay big; nibble, pursue free art, have a coffee, be happy. Let the Trumps of the world pay big.
On the other hand, if you really, really want to learn stuff as I have learned so that I can repeat it for your benefit and make a living scribbling my oddly rendered tales, you might want to take an art & architecture tour with a guide. That's what they do here. It's not free but you'll have lots of stories to tell. Don't you want to be a real interesting person? What's it worth to you?
