Nostalgie al museo. Viaggio attraverso le museografie di Ettore Guatelli e Franco Ferrero

This essay focuses on the role of nostalgia in the creation and in the fruition of ethnographic museums and folk museums in Italy. Through the figures of Ettore Guatelli and Franco Ferrero, “spontaneous ethnographers” and characters on the fringes of the intellectual and academic world, I want to provide an example of how nostalgic sensitivity is one of the main features of the creation of the ethnographic and folks museums. Briefly comparing two lives and professional paths of Ettore Guatelli and Franco Ferrero, exploring the nature of these two characters and their creations, I reflect on how nostalgia is the creative and driving force for a museum discourse over time and memory, through material culture, in museum anthropology