WTI Magazine #51    2015 January, 9
Author : Enrico De Iulis      Translation by:

In Trentino Alto Adige, a region of a rare but little known beauty, something interesting is happening. It is a region accustomed to a well-advanced approach regarding museology, and already more than ten years ago, in 2002, it gave a new location at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rovereto, MART.

The architect Mario Botta did an outstanding job and there was much debate on such a resonant museum in a village of a few tens of thousands of inhabitants. MART continues to reap success with audiences and critics for exhibitions staged in it, despite the little pool of users in potential.

A few kilometers from MART, a little more than a year ago MUSE opened: the Natural Science Museum in Trento. Same region, same results if not better; in a year the turnout at MUSE was over 700,000 people, where feasibility studies at most expected 130,000 per year.

Well, what is the secret of Trentino Alto Adige? What can we infer from these dramatic successes? The first reason is architectural: if an "archistar" signs the container, the turnout is already secured. Still, there is a specification to point out: in Italy, unfortunately, conversions of use, interior remakes and readapted exhibition venues are dramatically superior in number to buildings built from scratch. But each time a museum is built, people is attracted: not only by the name of the designer but also by his idea of the form, which in museums totally designed in a contemporary way, becomes function.

Since the beginning of the century, very few museums in Italy have seen the light from an original design, while the majority are the result of a readjustment of existing spaces. We wrote here months ago about Salerno and how it was one of the few Italian cities to have bet and invested on contemporary buildings and their potential attractive: well, other areas seem to have sensed the success of this concept, that in Italy has particular difficulties to be developed, especially in cities where new buildings are becoming very hard to emerge if not relegated to the suburbs.

Another important factor is related to the public; in recent months a law promoted by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage has allowed free admission to all national museums on the first Sunday of the month, resulting in a constant influx of success on those occasions. It is clear that when the museum is free its didactic, ethical, aesthetic and protective purpose exponentially increases. Even protective, yes, because more and more people in Italy use beauty as a shield and defense from the bad that surrounds, either being moral squalor or urban decay.

This concept is linked with a second reason evident in MUSE: Italian museology is guilty of having neglected all that is not art but instead requires ad hoc museum spaces, such as natural sciences, music and many other expressions of human activity that have been developing in centuries their philology, history, evolution and beauty.

These are important signals, that should be taught to some Ministers of previous Governments who insisted that culture is not productive. MUSE opening has generated an economic impact in the province of Trento of over 50 million euro, and we hope it will be an example for new openings across the nation.