ICOM International Council of Museums - Museo Estancia Jesuitica ...

Cristofano: The Italian Contemporary Museological Debate
In that period the awareness of lost memories brought many passionate people, fascinated by
objects filled with simple knowledge and experience, to collect disused things that had belonged to
people who had left their villages. During the Seventies these projects turned into real
spontaneous museums dedicated to local traditions that became places of identity, memory and
sense of belonging.
II.b The museological debate
Along with this “spontaneous museography”, during the Seventies experts started defining several
theoretical principles of anthropological museography. The Italian anthropologist Alberto Mario
Cirese 3 was probably the main character of this change. He emphasized the differences between
the folkloric object and the objet d’art stressing that, even if there are objects of the folkloric
context that are apt to be displayed (ceramics, votive paintings, etc.), the «majority of folkloric
museum objects original setting are not walls, pedestals, showcases» 4 . A museum shouldn’t limit
itself to showing the mere object. The object should be included in a system of information which
in return gives meaning to the object. Only within a context can the object cease to be “mute”.
According to this new Italian museographic conception, the fetish-masterpiece-object was
replaced by the “meditation related to it”. In that way the supremacy of the aesthetical dimension,
that in Italy had prevailed until then in the field of museology and museography, was abandoned.
The subject and the context that needed to be documented in the case of folkloric objects was
ample, and folkloric museums didn’t have to communicate their artistic value, but techniques and
the relation between uses and objects, such as «relations and life contexts that ethnographic
research have to study» 5 . However, according to the anthropologist, the museum can display and
convey nexuses of living life, only by re-ordering it in the museum language and dimension, by the
formulation of a disquisition on life that has its own rules.
In order to be communicated this disquisition makes use of technical devices that, at the end of
Sixties, Cirese identified in photography, tape-recorders and films, and that nowadays can be
found in all the audiovisual and multimedia devices that new technologies provide. The
fundamental prerequisite of the new museum described by Cirese was to reorder, to contextualize
knowledge about lost life through the display of both originals (real things) and subsidiary media,
such as charts, statistics, models, or any tool generally used by scholars to understand cultural
dynamics, and that could be democratically enjoyed by anyone in this type of museum.
However, as it was based on the assumption that scientific concepts formulated by research can
be easily conveyed, this museum became the place where the results of scientific research were
on display in a neutral and cold setting, crowded with writing.
III. A new contribution to the Italian museological debate
At the beginning of the 1980s, a new contribution to the Italian museum conceptions gradually
appeared. This came as the result of the studies and thought of another anthropologist, and
disciple of Cirese: Pietro Clemente 6 .
3
Alberto Mario Cirese was born in Avezzano in 1921. An excellent anthropologist, he can be considered the founder
of the Italian anthropological museology. Professor of cultural anthropology first at the University of Cagliari (1957-
1971), then at the University of Siena (1971-1973), and finally at “La Sapienza” University of Rome (1973-1992), he
is now Professor emeritus at the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia of “La Sapienza” University of Rome.
4
Alberto Mario Cirese, Le operazioni museografiche come metalinguaggio (1968) in Oggetti, segni, musei. Sulle
tradizioni contadine, Einaudi, Torino 1977, p.38.
5
Ibid., p.40.
6
Pietro Clemente was born in Nuoro in 1942. He was professor of history of folk traditions at the University of Siena.
Then he became professor of Cultural Antropology at “La Sapienza” University of Rome, and presently he teaches
Anthropology of Cultural Heritage at the University of Florence. He has dealt with the different aspects of popular
culture, museography and cultural heritage.
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