VENICE — We met Ilaria D’Uva in Venice, where she has just voiced the audio guide for the city’s Naval Museum. Two million people a year hear her at the Duomo of Milan, the Pantheon, Pompeii and Assisi. She grew up on bread and audio guides, daughter of the man who created Italy’s first audio guide in 1959 and convinced the future Pope Paul VI to install it in Milan Cathedral. Now, with AI circling, she insists her trade survives on the one thing machines cannot fake. Emotion.
Q. You were the only daughter in a family business built on telling Italy’s story. What was that like?
“I am the fourth child, and the first three are boys. I am the daughter in love with dad, and that is why I fell in love with the other creation of my father, the company Duva, set up in 1959. My dad invented the audio guide. So I grew up seeing him writing stories, recording stories, convincing priests, museum directors and curators to use our audio guide. One thing I always loved were the ladies recording the voices. I love voices. When I meet someone, the first thing that impresses me is the voice.”
Q. How did one Florentine family end up holding the keys to so many of Italy’s most iconic sites?
“It was not simple at all. When my dad started in 1959 with the machine where you put a coin and listen holding a telephone, he started in Florence, and they said no, we do not need your stuff. So he went to Milan, met the Archbishop, who became Pope Paul VI, and convinced him to install the machine in the Cathedral. That was our imprinting. The company carries the name of the family, and we kept it. Duva means nothing in the world of innovation, but it means a lot for this market. A company that is serious, steady, creative. That is why we are still alive. We survived COVID. A big American company died during it. We survived.”
Q. You moved beyond the classic audio guide into theatrical scripts and original soundtracks. Why turn a museum visit into storytelling?
“Because I love stories. I write the narration myself, because I understood it was the only way to survive the app, then Wikipedia, now AI. I use AI a lot. For my legal letters it is my lawyer. But what AI does not have is emotion. Feeling the context, understanding the mood. That is what I put into my work. Emotion, passion, fantasy. That is how we survive. Here in Venice we worked with the Teatro La Fenice orchestra and have an original soundtrack composed for us.”
Q. In 2019 you opened the San Giorgio Café on the island of San Giorgio in Venice, a museum bistro using only local ingredients. That feels like a leap from audio into something you can taste.
“I understood that offering only audio guides would not be enough, so I opened my company to managing museums. At the Fondazione Cini I said, please do not buy the audio guide, give me the chance to manage the service. Instead of you paying me, I will pay you. Then the director, a man of 84 with incredible blue eyes, asked why I did not manage the restaurant too. I had never run a restaurant in my life. It is in Venice, on an island, and I live in Florence. So, very simple. Why should I say no?”
Q. Since 2021 you have run the Treasure of San Gennaro museum in Naples, and you doubled visitors almost immediately. What were people missing?
“Whenever I manage a museum, I first improve the service. I produce an audio guide and put it inside the ticket price, free for the visitor. Then I change things little by little, with my company’s money, not the state’s. The setup, the lighting, the website, the advertising. Everything a company does to promote its product.”
Q. Of all the sites you have narrated, is there one place where you stop and think, this is why we do it?
“My favourite is always the last one. Right now I am working on the audio guide of Villa Adriana, and I have fallen in love with the Emperor Hadrian. I am reading Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, and I think I am his reincarnation, because I think like him.”
