The project is based on the ever more crucial notion of cultural landscape, and stems from the need to rethink urban landscape as a manifest representation of specific identities, relationships, and openings. The focus will be on the strategies of self-representation of urban communities between 19th and 20th Century, based on the case-studies of a few selected cities (Milan, Naples, Padua, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, and Venice), seen as spaces for the experimentation of research methods and the application of specific cultural tools.

The research will consider the phenomenon of displaying as it has been manifested inside and outside of the museums, and in the places of public gathering, in an attempt to comprehend and compare strategies and meanings adopted by communities to communicate their aesthetic, historical, social, political, and cultural image.

The constitution of a group as a visible – and visual – subject concerns the artworks conceived for everyday venues (salons, university buildings, chemist’s shops, hotels), as well as public collections, where objects from the past, continuously re-invented through different museum layouts, have been variously showing the deliberate, goal-driven nature of a concept like “tradition”.

The idea of “museum of the city” behind the project is extremely broad. The shared object of analysis, the museum, will be seen in the traditional sense of a codified site for the preservation and valorization of important tokens of specific times in history (variously taken away from their original context), as well as in the expanded forms it has taken more recently, all closely connected with the urban space and social imagery, with its specific instances, languages and media. The proposed chronology covers the period from the broad transformations of the latter half of the 19th Century to the present: it will be studied through archive research, inquiry on visual documents, the analysis of guides, journals, and various publications, including the most recent visual and multimedia sources. The four research units (Milan, Naples, Padua and Verona) will develop inquiries in both directions: Milan and Naples will mostly focus on the museum as a “closed form” that emerged paradigmatically between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century, but is still lively today, as it struggles to address the dichotomy between the representation of the urban structure and that of the web of connections that shape it. They will address the political, critical, and social history of the selected cities, as well as their modern heritage, made of gentrification processes and practices of “selection” and “setting” of memory. The Verona and Padua units will focus primarily on the city as widespread museum, as the place of self-representation of both new and old identities, in a critical period like that between the 19th and 20th Century. The core of their research will be the analysis of those artistic enterprises that shaped the visual identity of some cities in Veneto and Lombardy, creating new cultural, social, and political forms of identity-projection.

The final outcome of the research will be the implementation of innovative methods, tools, and materials for a virtual museum of urban landscape, able to suggest an interpretation of the cultural heritage from the past “as a reflection and expression of their constantly evolving values, beliefs, knowledge and traditions”, and to comprehend “all aspects of the environment resulting from the interaction between people and places through time” (Faro, 2005).

At the same time, the research will suggest actual museums new possible exhibition strategies eliciting a more effective dialogue with the community and contemporary society. The creation of an informatic system of acknowledgement and open-source valorization of the acquired data will possibly help creating new networks of collaboration among institutions, providing partially-processed materials for the creation of tools enhancing the viewer’s perceptive faculties, and increasing the quality time spent by people in museums and culturally significant places around the city. Finally, it will provide city administrations, foundations and associations part of the research outcomes, in order to activate the creation of itineraries for the awareness and valorization of the city’s heritage

Working group:

1. Elena Di Raddo - Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
2. Francesco Tedeschi - Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
3. Alessandra Squizzato - Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
4. Kevin McManus - Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Partner:

1. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Coordinator);
2. Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”;
3. Università degli Studi di Padova;
4. Università degli Studi di Verona.