FLORENCE, Italy — Eike Schmidt, the new director of the Uffizi Gallery here and the first non-Italian to hold the job, took what seemed a logical step. In the spring, he set up loudspeakers warning visitors about scalpers and pickpockets who target tourists waiting in the perennially long lines outside Italy’s most-visited museum, famous for its magnificent treasures by Botticelli and Raphael.  But not everyone was grateful. A few days later, three Florence police officers with local media in tow arrived at his desk and handed him a fine of about $329, for broadcasting without proper city authorization. “Initially I was a little bit angry,” Mr. Schmidt, a German art historian, said recently over a glass of wine. But he quickly spotted an opportunity, telling them he would pay the fine out of his own pocket. The next day, when he did, journalists were there snapping photos, making him an instant local celebrity.  Florentines began approaching Mr. Schmidt on the street to express their support. “Some initially said: ‘Don’t stop. Finally someone takes these problems seriously,’” Mr. Schmidt said. “There are other people who actually try to give me money,” he added with a laugh. Once seen as a naïve foreigner, he had earned public respect.  The clashing reactions to the loudspeaker experiment point to a fundamental challenge facing Mr. Schmidt. As he fights to manage the crowds, generate more revenue and improve the museum experience — including its chaotic ticketing system and long lines — will he continue to marshal popular support and prevail against a morass of bureaucratic restraints, vested interests and political intrigue?  “It’s like playing multiple chess games at the same time,” Mr. Schmidt said.  Last year, the Uffizi, Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens merged into one entity, and 3.4 million people visited, resulting in 17.3 million euros, or about $19.2 million, in ticket revenue for the state, making it the most profitable museum in Italy. Mr. Schmidt’s goal is to improve the museum’s flow; oversee a building renovation; reorganize the administration; rationalize a haphazard exhibition schedule; foster serious scholarship; rewrite wall labels; and find innovative ways to showcase a collection that has more than 12,000 paintings, 3,500 ancient sculptures, and 180,000 prints and drawings, including works from Latin America collected over the centuries but rarely shown.  Overseeing the Uffizi, with its world-class holdings and public-sector staffing, is a bit like running the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the same time.  But things are changing in Italy. Mr. Schmidt, 48, was hired last year from his job as a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art as part of a sweeping reform that gave 20 Italian institutions greater autonomy from the Culture Ministry in Rome, which funds and staffs them.  In what was perceived as a bold move, the Ministry opened directorships, for the first time, to an international search, eventually hiring seven non-Italians. Mr. Schmidt, a scholar of the Medici collection that formed the basis of the Uffizi, had lived in Florence in the past.  The reform, advanced by the culture minister, Dario Franceschini, was intended to bring in fresh talent and give these “super museums” — including the Capodimonte in Naples, the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and the Accademia in Venice — more control over their budgets, exhibitions and services like cafes and bookshops, to become more self-sustaining at a time when Italy’s economy is stagnating.  The change is dramatic for Italy, where the ministry has traditionally run the country’s museums. Since the 1990s, some museum functions, including temporary exhibitions, were outsourced to private companies, creating a confusing overlap of jurisdictions that the reform hopes to untangle.  “The decision to appoint 20 directors at the same time is very courageous,” said Umberto Allemandi, the editor and founder of the Giornale dell’Arte, an Italian arts monthly. “I’d almost say it’s reckless, but it’s necessary, because if you don’t do things in a clamorous way, you run the risk that another 20, 30, 40 years will pass.”  Foreign museum directors are common elsewhere, including at the Met in New York. Appointing a German to the Uffizi is a powerful statement in today’s Europe, where Germany dominates, but Mr. Schmidt plays down that dynamic, noting that in past centuries, the Medici imported a police force from Germany because it was seen as neutral, without local loyalties.  The question facing Mr. Schmidt — can Italy change? — is the same one facing Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, 41, a former mayor of Florence who is deeply invested in the museum’s fate. He came to power in 2014 promising reform but now sees growing resistance. Creating the autonomous museums is a key part of his legacy. Both are in play, if not in jeopardy.  I observed the challenges up close one day in late June, when I attended a staff meeting with Mr. Schmidt, who was sitting in front of Botticelli’s “Annunciation,” a Renaissance jewel in the collection, displayed temporarily in a room where Dante once gave speeches.  In fluent Italian, Mr. Schmidt was discussing how to open to the public one of the museum’s most prized features, a corridor designed by Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century Italian artist and author. It is now open only to small tours run by private companies that often profit more than the museum does.  The Vasari Corridor begins inside the Uffizi, once the Medici seat of government, in an area damaged by a Mafia bomb in 1993, and traverses the Arno River via the top floor of the Ponte Vecchio, Florence’s famed 1345 bridge. The end point is the Pitti Palace, where the Medici once lived and which now houses other museums.  The Uffizi has the world’s oldest and largest collection of self-portraits, and since the 1970s, the corridor has been lined with more than 700 of them. There are Annibale Carracci’s portrait of himself on a canvas on an easel and ones by Titian, Delacroix, Ingres, Sargent, Morandi, even Rauschenberg, up to the present day. There are also rarely seen self-portraits by women, from Angelica Kauffmann and Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun to the lesser-known 18th-century figure Violante Beatrice Siries of Cremona and Rosalba Carriera of Venice.  Most visitors never get to see them, and Mr. Schmidt, who has also been a curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, also worries about their condition. In the corridor, he said, “they get deep-fried in summer and deep-frozen in winter.”
With long lines, chaotic ticketing and a collection to rival the Louvre’s, the Uffizi Gallery is at the forefront of dramatic reforms.