Public museums and Public value creation in marginal contexts. Structuring relational capital trough popular cotemporary culture.

Cultural resources, under a managerial perspective, are to be considered a original combination of tangible and intangible assets addressed to build and reinforce territorial identity and to promote a social evolution process. This system is supported by public sector activities or investments whose values are often under estimated in peripheral contexts. The vastness of the Italian archaeological asset, mainly public, sets the emphasis on sustainability, cultural fruition and socio economic exploitation as questions to be rapidly answered. The continuous shrinkage of financial resources, for many peripheral institutions, is becoming a threat for both their survival and their empowerment or legitimatization. The connection between the museum and the territory is an important point to start from in order to overcome this peripheral condition. The new strategies can be set on the basis of the quality of the available resources, especially the intangible ones. This paper treats the difficulties of being peripheral trying to highlight some hypothesis that could help to manage such a condition producing public value. After some theoretical premises it focuses on the case study of the archaeological museum of Gela paradigmatic of the strong divergences existing between the high objective value of the owned collections, its historical traditions and its marginal dimension if related to visitors flows and the anthropic context. The paper tries to propose an analytical measure to represent the public value production process starting by the museum accounting official data.