They are also called “engines of economic growth” by those who do not even understand how far behind those who “occupy” that patrimony are, managing jobs and budgets rather than enhancing locations and, in so doing, let them rot away (as partly happens in Pompeii).

Culture, whether one likes or not, has become a consumer good, partly due to digital technology. Demand for it is globalized and hundreds of million of tourists from the “new worlds” invade Europe and Ialy every year. Now it is the time to strategically direct the use of our rich heritage, in a mid- to long-term perspective and in an economically sustainable way.

We should identify a path, create an Italian cultural agenda and redefine the role of creativity for the country’s welfare. In principle, there is nothing new: 40 years ago the UNESCO convention on the protection of the world’s cultural and natural human patrimony (ratified by Italy only six years later) declared culture and creativity “levers of a sustainable development” and it has, so far, under its protection almost 100 sites in 160 countries, among which a record 49—and just as many in the list of future candidates—are within Italian borders. After all, even the strategy by the European Union for growth, the so-called Europe 2020, is accompanied by a road map for culture intended to enhance the cultural and creative potential of businesses in various sectors.

Even in Italy, the role of culture in the economy has never completely disappeared from the horizon. It can be found in the white book on creativity drafted by independent experts, in charge since 2009 by appointment of the minister of cultural goods and activities, in offering ideas to enhance cultural production and industry. And an intense debate was finally triggered by the Manifesto for a Cultural Constitutional Assembly proposed in 2012 by “Il Sole 24 Ore’s” Sunday magazine and later discussed at the General States of culture, opened in Rome by President Giorgio Napolitano.

The model is simple, yet the challenge is a very difficult one, precisely because of the limitless possibility of reproduction offered by digital technology. Instead, culture and creativity are synonymous with uniqueness, authenticity and nonubiquity.

Walter Santagata, France’s and Italy’s main economy-of-culture expert and president of the commission that curated the white book (and who unexpectedly died this summer), summarized the concept of “culture factory” (which is also the title of an essay of his) as follows: “producing culture and knowledge require creativity, otherwise repetitiveness, school-like, thus déjà vu material prevails.” In other words, without an adequate and timely plan for development, cultural patrimony is exposed to the same piracy risk afflicting alimentary products through counterfeit brands.

Culture and creativity are, to say the least, elusive concepts. Their names are extremely overused and therefore insufficient to define them. The 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity helps shed light on this: it was very important as it, unanimously approved in Paris a few weeks after the September 11 attacks, affirms the values of pluralism and integration against any form of fundamentalism and defines culture as “the sum of the different aspects coexisting within a society or a a social group, such as spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional ones. It also includes value systems, traditions and beliefs, together with art, literature and various ways of life.”

For our purposes, some forms in which culture manifests itself are particularly important: capital, production, cultural industry. Capital incorporates, preserves and gives added cultural value on top of other economic kinds of value; production includes the ideation, creation and distribution process of cultural goods. The European Commission just defined last year cultural industry as the sector “that produces and commercializes goods and services coming from cultural expressions.”

Sometimes it is easier to believe that artistic activity is foreign to production and therefore to economic value. On the contrary, all these aspects coexist. And we realize it very well when great artistic institutions are at risk of folding or when, even though well administered and balanced, are compared to no matter what public agency, with serious as well as unpredictable and involuntary effects.

In the fall of 2013 the La Scala theater sounded the alarm. In a decree entitled “Enhancement and Relaunching of Cultural Goods and Activities and Tourism” the Parliament set limits on the presence of private entities on the managing board in order to protect the autonomy and the balance of the operatic institution, which makes up for only a third of its total 116 million euro budget through public funding, makes almost as much with tickets and rights and gets the remaining third from associated businesses and sponsors.

In short, the measure called “culture value” will obtain the exact opposite. The government admitted to the mistake, but there was no more time to modify the text without risking the decree’s decadence altogether. Then it made a promise: as soon as the first chance arises an amendment to some other decree will right this wrong.

This concrete, specific example has helped to highlight a general problem: purely cultural profiles always coexist with economic ones. Every artistic performance is the result of a complex variety of activities, with and without economic value. A theatrical play is born from the author’s creativity, but it can support the activity of an entire theater company only if protected by intellectual-property rights.

The cultural capital, incorporated in theater, surpasses the added value of each creation and includes the author, the actors and the venue. The Pirandello revolution of the 20th century is an example of cultural capital piled up over time, made of creativity and distribution and ultimately attributed to its own author.

Not always does this capital pass on “forever” to all material structures that contributed to make it grow: the story of Rome’s Valle Theater, which 90 years ago hosted the premiere of “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” the emblematic play for such a revolution, can trigger a few bitter and ironic reflections. It took Pirandello four years and two rewritings for the public to begin appreciating the opera—criticized and not rerun for a long time.

Today the Valle Theater, closed in 2011 due the failure of the managing company—the suppressed Italian Theater Agency—after a two-year occupation by its workers, became a “foundation for the common good” and initiated a program, exempting itself from the paying of tributes and copyright fees. It is a case of self-support, maybe—definitely not one of system sustainability, with at least 10 other theaters not far from it that pay their dues and struggle just as much to survive.

Theater is an industry with a very peculiar relation between supply and demand, different job markets and incentive mechanisms. It has the shape of a multiproduct business in which scale and objective economies assume a relevant weight. That is what we do: activities that incorporate culture, in the sense we defined above, and are born out of the creativity of an author or an organized group.

Marco Magnani is senior research fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and president of Intercultura. During the General States of Culture organized by “Il Sole 24 Ore,” he will speak on “Outlook on Valorization of the Cultural Market.”