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these projects turned into real spontaneous museums dedicated to local traditions thatbecame places of identity, memory and sense of belonging.II.b The museological debateAlong with this “spontaneous museography”, during the Seventies experts starteddefining several theoretical principles of anthropological museography. The Italiananthropologist Alberto Mario Cirese 2 was probably the main character of this change.He emphasized the differences between the folkloric object and the objet d’artstressing that, even if there are objects of the folkloric context that are apt to bedisplayed (ceramics, votive paintings, etc.), the «majority of folkloric museum objectsoriginal setting are not walls, pedestals, showcases» 3 . A museum shouldn’t limit itselfto showing the mere object. The object should be included in a system of informationwhich in return gives meaning to the object. Only within a context can the object ceaseto be “mute”. According to this new Italian museographic conception, the fetishmasterpiece-objectwas replaced by the “meditation related to it”. In that way thesupremacy of the aesthetical dimension, that in Italy had prevailed until then in the fieldof museology and museography, was abandoned.The subject and the context that needed to be documented in the case of folkloricobjects was ample, and folkloric museums didn’t have to communicate their artisticvalue, but techniques and the relation between uses and objects, such as «relationsand life contexts that ethnographic research have to study» 4 . However, according tothe anthropologist, the museum can display and convey nexuses of living life, only byre-ordering it in the museum language and dimension, by the formulation of adisquisition on life that has its own rules.In order to be communicated this disquisition makes use of technical devices that, atthe end of Sixties, Cirese identified in photography, tape-recorders and films, and thatnowadays can be found in all the audiovisual and multimedia devices that newtechnologies provide. The fundamental prerequisite of the new museum described byCirese was to reorder, to contextualize knowledge about lost life through the display ofboth originals (real things) and subsidiary media, such as charts, statistics, models, orany tool generally used by scholars to understand cultural dynamics, and that could bedemocratically enjoyed by anyone in this type of museum.However, as it was based on the assumption that scientific concepts formulated byresearch can be easily conveyed, this museum became the place where the results ofscientific research were on display in a neutral and cold setting, crowded with writing.III. A new contribution to the Italian museological debateAt the beginning of the 1980s, a new contribution to the Italian museum conceptionsgradually appeared. This came as the result of the studies and thought of anotheranthropologist, and disciple of Cirese: Pietro Clemente 5 .Clemente’s museological conception stems from a critique of Cirese’s concept ofmuseum as a place that displays scientific research results. According to Clemente thiswould lead to a «new elitist tradition of museography, not directed to connoisseurs and2 Alberto Mario Cirese was born in Avezzano in 1921. An excellent anthropologist, he can be consideredthe founder of the Italian anthropological museology. Professor of cultural anthropology first at theUniversity of Cagliari (1957-1971), then at the University of Siena (1971-1973), and finally at “LaSapienza” University of Rome (1973-1992), he is now Professor emeritus at the Facoltà di Lettere eFilosofia of “La Sapienza” University of Rome.3 Alberto Mario Cirese, Le operazioni museografiche come metalinguaggio (1968) in Oggetti, segni,musei. Sulle tradizioni contadine, Einaudi, Torino 1977, p.38.4 Ibid., p.40.5 Pietro Clemente was born in Nuoro in 1942. He was professor of history of folk traditions at theUniversity of Siena. Then he became professor of Cultural Antropology at “La Sapienza” University ofRome, and presently he teaches Anthropology of Cultural Heritage at the University of Florence. He hasdealt with the different aspects of popular culture, museography and cultural heritage.198