The Tale of Made in Italy and the Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation: The Relationship Between Collections and Exhibition Choices

The Cirulli Foundation was established in Bologna in February 2015 as the result of an important 30-year acquisitions activity aimed at enhancing Italian visual culture from the early twentieth century to the years of the economic boom. The Foundation’s collection is often regarded as the most important privately held collection devoted to post-World War II graphic art and design in Italy. The essay aims to explore the museographic and museological aspects of the collection: the building (originally created by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Dino Gavina) and its philological restoration, the exhibition of designed objects created as an “animated archive” of thematic explorations (the “capsule collections”), developed by US designer Jeffrey Schnapp, the collection and the temporary exhibitions (following a complementary narrative methodology, combining cues, storytelling, and scholarly research) and its enhancement and mediation.