This digital book is dedicated to teachers of all disciplines and grades. It wants to be a key to reading (among the many possible ones) for knowing how to see and visit museums, in a non-trivial way.
Everyone thinks they know what a museum is and how to manage it; the media of all kinds are full of statistical analyses, suggestions, verdicts, very general and often wrong; because museums are a very complex institution with a very long history. Visiting them is not easy, getting to know them better can be an exciting experience. They can be known/seen in many ways; in this book we will get to know them in some of their elements: the architectural form (the container), the collections (the content), the relationship with the public (communication), the people who work there.
It is not possible to tell the museum institution in a single book, necessarily brief. I therefore wanted to limit myself to offering an outline of themes and problems. The historical and scientific literature on the subject is endless. To encourage some interesting reading, it is better to search the ICOM-Italia website which contains so many useful things, including the latest and most valid publication on museology in general: a booklet in the form of a dictionary: André Devallées and François Mairesse (a edited by), Key Concepts of Museology (excellent Italian translation of 2016 of the Concepts clés de muséologie, published by ICOM since 2009).
I also wanted to tell the stories of some of the heroes, positive and negative, in the history of museums, thinking that it is always through these examples that young people and future citizens can be taught. I thought it right to focus readers' attention on some current problems: above all the question of the commodification of museums and their collections.
Thanks to the immense possibilities that a digital book offers, images take up a lot of space, calling attention to themes such as the architecture and installations of large museums around the world, but also to the activities of small Italian museums aimed at citizens and communities and on how a great problem of our time, migration, also enters museums. The text and image captions are full of links to the sites of museums and professional associations of museologists, using which you will be able to expand this grid and build your own digital museum book yourself.
The eBook created with the Cultural Heritage Education Sector of Italia Nostra, with which I have been happily collaborating for years now, and is published by Treccani Enciclopedia Italiana. You can read and download it for free from their respective sites, together with the other 3 digital books on art and landscape in this series, which we have called…ALADIN. The digital books can be downloaded in PDF format from the Italia Nostra Edu website.
