WTI Magazine #58    2015 April, 17
Author : Enrico de Iulis      Translation by: John Cabot University

The transformation of Milan - because of the forthcoming Universal Exposition - has been constantly growing. Besides the website for the event, for the new infrastructures of the city and the railroad modernizations, the Ambrosian museum centers are getting into the swing of things to be best prepared for the worldwide EXPO.

The National Museum of the Academy of Brera reopens the closed wings of the building, increasing the rooms for the permanent exposition and sets up the beautiful botanical garden within its courtyard. Even the Municipality will hold art works from Florence and Rome, as Cosimo's I tapestries (of which we wrote about weeks ago) and many other works directly from Uffizi's Museum and The Museum of Modern Art of Rome. Moreover, expositions on Leonardo and Giotto would be held in Palazzo Reale, the main location of the city for the most important artistic expositions.

However, the new jewel that enriches the artistic prestige of the museums in Milan is MUDEC, Museum of Cultures. The project of this museum has been starting from the mid of '90s, when the municipality of Milan purchased the area of the old factories "Ansaldo" in the Tortona district. However, because of the economic crisis of the last years, the superintendent Marina Pugliese had to review the whole initial project of the museum, modifying the original idea.

Due to the lack of monetary funds, the area of the permanent exposition has been strongly downsized for the aspect of temporary exhibitions, which will have more space and importance. The storages of the museum could be visited within the permanent exposition because of the rotation.

The entire idea of the museum starts from the Seventeenth Century collection of Manfredo Settala, one of the most famous collections of Wunderkammern in that century, which represents a necessary step to the visitors of the city. The ensemble of the collection - by the curator Pugliese - is exemplary and it creates a philological and systematic core to be the starting basis of many thematic, historical and geographic paths represented through artistic exhibitions ad hoc.

The exhibition itinerary is articulated from 1500 onward, representing either the taste of each time or the development, through modern and contemporary art, of the ethnological and anthropological discoveries as well as the ethnographical ones up to our days. This aspect enhances the exotic taste of Milan, since the period of "semai", the merchants of silkworm between the Far East and Italy. A restoration laboratory for ethnography and contemporary art would be started within the permanent exposition as well.

Waiting for the final structure of the museum, that will be ready next Fall with the opening of the part that will host the reconstruction of the Settala's collection, the MUDEC will be inaugurated with two exhibitions, one on the African art and its expressive genius, and the other one commemorative on the International Exposition of Milan in 1906, the same year as the inauguration of the Central Station and the opening of the Sempione tunnel. Those are still important works that have conveyed a small record to that International Exposition: it was the first exhibition entirely modernized that preferred to embrace "the science as agent of transformation of Western society" to the commodities fairs of the Nineteenth Century. This modern approach opened Italy toward a hope in the scientific progress, which unfortunately after few years would have been destroyed by the burst of the First World War.