| Abstract: | ‘L’Itala gente dalle molte vite’ (‘The many lives of Italian people’): with these words by the poet Giosuè Carducci, Lamberto Loria summed up his project to collect the material evidence of Italian culture. This report aims to trace the ideology that accompanied the birth of ethnoanthropological museums in Italy from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It will focus mainly on the period that follows Pigorini’s efforts, as outlined in Maria Gabriella Lerario’s report. The will of the founders of Italian ethnography to develop the collection of objects belonging to the rural world of the peninsula can be traced back to the First Congress of Italian Ethnography held in Rome in 1911 that accompanied the International Exhibition on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification.
However, the dream of a national museum was interrupted during the Interwar period. Indeed, the Museo Nazionale delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari was only installed in the 1950s thanks to the arrangement of the collection of objects gathered by Loria four decades earlier and the desire to put on display the multiple facets of Italian national identity and its regional and local specificities. This interest in the regional differences was maintained in the 1970s, when there was an unexpected social phenomenon: the establishment of local ethnographic museums created by local associations of volunteers helped by academic anthropologists and, in recent years, also by Italian law.
In the last 50 years some anthropologists like Alberto Mario Cirese and Pietro Clemente, have developed theories related to the exhibition of ethnographic objects and have provided an anthropologic analysis of this phenomenon, which was very different in the North of Italy compared to the South. The report ends with some examples of Italian ethnographical practice related to museums, which show the evolution of museographic theories in this field and the influence of new multimedia tools. |
Ph.D., Lic. Theses
