Has your lovely canine companion prevented you from absorbing all the fabulous art that your city’s museums and galleries have to offer? If the answer is yes (and you live in Italy) we’ve got some good news.
BauAdvisor, a dog services company, is offering free dog-sitting to culture vultures at tourist sites across Rome right now, and 40 people utilised the service when it launched on January 12.
Trained minders are currently located at four different attractions, including the Museum of Ara Pacis, the MAXXI Museum of Contemporary Art and Castel Sant’Angelo, and they feed, water and walk pooches during their owners’ visits.
The service will move across Italian towns and cities for one day a month between now and April 2026, and it can be booked via the website or an app.
Future stops include the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (February 2), the Uffizi in Florence (September 7), and the National Archaeological Museum in Naples (October 5), according to the Times.
Before you get too excited, this doesn’t seem to be a permanent offering: it’s a promotional service to raise awareness for the paid dog-minding offering that BauAdvisor launched two years ago, which costs €10 per hour (but has no cap on the length of time, so you can browse at your leisure).
So, why is the service being offered? Well, according to a report published in 2024 by Eurispes, more than a third of Italian families have pets (four out of 10 of these are likely dogs), but the director of BauAdvisor, Dino Gasperini, said he thinks around half of dog owners don’t bother with museum or gallery visits because they don’t want to leave their pet.
‘Dog-sitting at museums is positive because it means people do not need to choose between their pets and art,’ said archeology professor at the University of Bari Giuliano Volpe.
It’s a paw-some idea, right? Have a look at the best museums in Rome, Venice and Florence, as well as our roundup of the best new things to do in the world this year.
Did you see that after six years of works, Paris’s biggest cinema screen is back?
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