Italy's museums brace for post-pandemic success
H
aving suffered through the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, museums and galleries across Italy are now eager to lure new visitors.
Their efforts range from completing overdue renovations to installing new multimedia projects, all aimed at building a different, new relationship with local communities and visitors alike, Xinhua news agency reported.
A case in point is the prestigious Galleria Borghese in Rome, which has decided to include classical music concerts in its offer.
Renowned for its collection of sculptures, bas-reliefs, paintings and sculptures dating from the 15th-19th centuries, including by Baroque artist Caravaggio, December the gallery last DEcember launched a concert program called "The Borghese and Music", with artists performing Baroque music in the museum's luxuriously frescoed halls.
The concerts are broadcast live on the gallery's website, on its social media channels, on the ANSA news agency's website and on state radio broadcaster RAI.
As art historian Geraldine Leardi explained in a video presentation, this "research project focuses on music commissioned by the (noble) Borghese family from various musicians in the 17th and 18th centuries".
A similar initiative called "Art that Comforts" involves Italian actors reading poems inspired by some masterpieces hosted in the museum, which the public can enjoy through short video stories on the gallery's website.
Francesca Cappelletti, director of Galleria Borghese since late 2020, told local media that an "open and inclusive" approach would help her institution as well as other cultural venues reach out to new and possibly younger audiences, and would enable them to more actively engage the public.
Other museums in Italy, such as the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and the Lombardy Region Museum Pole, which comprises 12 state museums across the northern region surrounding Milan, the country's economic capital, and which includes Milan's Dominican Church and the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie hosting Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, have bet on initiatives to "scatter" their rich collections around their own region.
Across central Tuscany, therefore, the "Uffizi Diffusi" (scattered Uffizi) has set up different exhibitions in smaller cities and towns to enable people to discover new tourist destinations and enjoy the museum's artworks while avoiding overcrowding at the ancient palaces of the historic Uffizi in Florence.
The idea behind the initiative is to help make tourism flows more environmentally and socially sustainable.
In a recent interview, Lombardy museum complex Director Emanuela Daffra told Xinhua that the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the managements of all the country's museums to "reinvent" the way they approach and address the public.
"It prompted people to discover nearby places in the region, which had previously been a little neglected... One example is our Museum of the Certosa di Pavia, where we now see queues of visitors on weekends, something that has never happened before," she said.
"This is an extraordinary opportunity for us to build a new and lasting relationship with the public."
For Lombardy's Museum Pole, as for many other Italian museums, another way to increase their attractiveness is to make better use of their "virtual" tools.
"Still during the lockdown, for example, we launched on our social media a digital description of our most famous masterpiece, Leonardo's Last Supper, based on a very high-definition image that allows you to zoom in like with a microscope... Visitors can now enjoy details that the human eye could never before see," Daffra said.
"We allow people to 'experience' the Last Supper as they never before could, since at the museum they can never get so close to the painting... Of course, this does not replace a visit to the museum in person, it rather augments it."
Meanwhile, to make themselves more attractive, several museums have either completed (or were about to complete) renovation works or enriched their collections with new artworks.
Examples include the ancient Roman section of the Archaeological Museum at the Farnese Palace in northern Piacenza, the National Gallery in the central Umbria region, the Diocesan Museum in Sicily's Palermo, or the Pompeii Archaeological Park, where a tomb has recently been unearthed with the partially mummified remains of a man who died a few decades before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
✔️ Italy's museums brace for post-pandemic success
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