Musei e display: Roma negli anni della "Fata Morgana"

In the nineteenth century, throughout Europe, museums gained increased cultural and social significance, acquiring values of identity and memory. In Italy, such values were linked to political nation building and, later, to the outcomes of the Risorgimento. The analysis of museum settings in the nineteenth century can also be completed by turning to contemporary texts, which often offer accounts connected with the rules and tastes of the time. Museums are “historical devices.” Studying history, shaping taste and educating people were some of the symbolic themes around which displays in museum spaces were to evolve in the nineteenth century. In this essay, exhibition setups are viewed as narrative systems expressing identity and political values. Reflections are suggested on the mise en scene and museographic arrangement of the rooms in Roman museums at a time when the idea of “Rome as Capital” was a political aspiration for some and a dangerous illusion for others. As an angle, the analysis of a specific source was chosen. For its consistent editorial policy and target audience, L’Album: Giornale Letterario e di Belle Arti was a unique example in the era’s Italian magazine scene. In the mid nineteenth century, the relevance given to classification principles started affecting art and archaeology museums as well. Indeed, collections were displayed according to geographical and time coordinates, with the aim of giving Art a History. In “Papal Rome,” and later in “Rome as Capital,” routes in art and archaeology museums would continue to be organized in keeping with the thought of Enlightenment, as well as with the will to classify pieces faithfully reproducing divisions into schools and regions. In constructing displays based on nation-object, institution-object and space-object relations, collections were raised to heritage status. By crossing the symbolic threshold of the museum, they acquired universal value and a legitimacy beyond the ephemeral aspects of fashion and taste. L’Album mirrored the cultural customs of the time’s educated middle class. Often showcasing fine chalcographic engravings, the magazine was especially interesting because it coupled literary descriptions of displays in the new Roman museums with detailed reproductions of some of the latter’s halls, in illustrations explicitly provided as alternatives to text. The halls in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, the Museo Gregoriano Egizio and the Museo Gregoriano Lateranense are analyzed from a museological perspective and considering the choices made in accordance with something of a “primitive museography” expressing both a cultural and a political emulation of museums present in other regions and nations, first and foremost in the court of the House of Savoy. While a specific will to educate the “ordinary” public also began to develop, the main intention was to present an Urbs capable of holding its own with other European capitals, in the field of science and technology as well, for example through the university museums of Mineralogy and Physics. Museums, the places where antiquity and Christian memory were traditionally preserved in Rome, now also became a space for modernity, where material culture was intended to serve progress.