Beyond Sight: Italy Reimagines Art and Tourism for Blind and Low-Vision Visitors

BY EMMANUEL OGBONNA

On a recent weeknight, long after the crowds had thinned and the souvenir vendors packed up, a small group moved quietly around the Colosseum in Rome. The ancient amphitheater stood dark and imposing, but the visitors were not there to look at it. Instead, they paused at intervals to absorb its history, form and meaning through sound, touch, imagination and careful description.

Among them was Michela Marcato, 54, who has been blind since birth. Accompanied by her partially sighted partner, she was taking part in a tour designed specifically for people with blindness or low vision, part of a broader effort across Italy to make its vast artistic and cultural heritage more accessible while also encouraging new ways for all visitors to experience art.

As the guide spoke, Marcato ran her fingers across a small model of the Colosseum she held in her hands. She traced the rhythm of its arches and felt the rough texture of its damaged outer wall. What surprised her most was something many sighted visitors take for granted: the building’s shape.

“Walking around it, I personally would never have realized it,” she said. “I would never have understood it. But with that little model in your hand, it’s obvious.”

Italy’s historic cities attract millions of visitors each year, yet for decades they have posed serious challenges for people with disabilities. Narrow doorways, staircases without ramps, uneven cobblestones and limited elevators often make movement difficult for wheelchair users. For blind and low-vision visitors, museums and monuments have traditionally offered little beyond verbal explanations, with touching artworks almost always prohibited.

That has begun to change in recent years. In 2021, as part of the conditions tied to European Union pandemic recovery funding, Italy accelerated long-delayed accessibility initiatives. New resources were directed toward removing architectural barriers, improving access to tourist sites and sporting venues, and developing programs that go beyond physical access to include sensory and cognitive inclusion.

At the archaeological site of Pompeii, officials have installed a comprehensive system aimed at visitors with disabilities. Braille signage, QR-coded audio guides, tactile models of buildings and bas-relief reproductions of artifacts allow blind visitors to better understand the scale and detail of the ancient city. In Florence, authorities have published detailed accessibility guides for the Uffizi Gallery and other major museums, outlining routes, requirements and limitations, including the need for companions at certain historic sites such as the Boboli Gardens, where preservation constraints make full accessibility impossible.

Advocates note that inclusive tourism is not only a matter of rights but also of economics. According to the World Tourism Organization, nearly half of the global population over the age of 60 lives with some form of disability, and travelers with disabilities often travel with companions, multiplying their economic impact.

For guides like Giorgio Guardi of the Radici Association, which has organized tours in Rome for people with disabilities since 2015, accessibility is about reshaping the entire experience. Guardi says inclusive tourism means slowing the pace, reducing sensory overload and encouraging visitors to engage with art and history in different ways.

Many of Radici’s walking tours take place at night, when famous sites are quieter and ambient noise is reduced. When direct touch is not possible, guides rely on creative techniques to convey form and meaning.

In Rome’s Campo dei Fiori, for example, the statue of philosopher Giordano Bruno stands high above the square, unreachable by hand. During a recent nighttime tour, Guardi invited participants to physically imitate the figure instead. One visitor hunched forward, arms clasped around an imaginary book, as Guardi draped a heavy cape over his shoulders. Others took turns touching him, feeling the slope of his shoulders and the weight suggested by the pose, while a sign-language interpreter relayed the story of Bruno’s execution during the Inquisition to deaf participants.

Italy’s most radical experiment in tactile art can be found far from Rome, in the Adriatic city of Ancona. There, the Museo Omero stands as the country’s only publicly funded tactile museum, founded in the early 1990s by Aldo and Daniela Grassini, both of whom are blind. Frustrated by repeated prohibitions against touching art during their travels, the couple created a space where handling the works is not only allowed but essential.

Named after Homer, the blind poet of antiquity, the museum houses life-size replicas of classical Greek and Roman sculptures, reproductions of Renaissance masterpieces such as the head of Michelangelo’s David, and contemporary works designed to be explored by hand.

“Touching something isn’t like looking at it,” Aldo Grassini said. “Not just because of the emotion it offers, but because of the type of knowledge that sensation provides.” He describes sight as an overbearing sense that tends to dominate perception, while touch opens a different path to understanding. “If something is dear to us, we don’t just look at it. We caress it. That gives a different emotion.”

One of the artists exhibited at the museum is Felice Tagliaferri, who is himself blind. At his studio near Cesena, Tagliaferri spoke about a marble bust he sculpted of his late friend Angela. He recalled lying beside her during her illness, memorizing the shape of her head with his hands after she lost her hair to cancer. “When she passed away, Angela remained in my hands,” he said. “I recreated this sculpture thinking of her.”

For Marcato, whose nighttime walk around the Colosseum offered a new understanding of a monument she has known all her life, art does not require sight to be meaningful. She and her partner live in an apartment in eastern Rome dominated by a large painting of the sea. He can see it with the help of special lighting and magnification. She cannot see it at all, yet the work resonates deeply with her own experiences.

For Marcato, the painting evokes the sound of waves, the shifting rhythms of water, the smell of salt in the air and the sensation of walking along the shore in different seasons. It is, she says, a way of experiencing art that has nothing to do with vision and everything to do with memory, touch and emotion.

As Italy continues to rethink how its cultural heritage is shared, such perspectives are increasingly shaping a quieter revolution in tourism, one that invites visitors not just to look, but to feel, listen and imagine.