Some time ago a journalist friend of mine gave me the book she had just written, with a rather humdrum title: A Guide to the Museums of Rome. I took it for one of the many guides meant for tourists, that is, for the more or less cultured travellers who do not want to stop at the Musei Vaticani, the Colosseo and the Galleria Borghese; but that was not the case.
Opening the book, if only out of affection, I discovered that it was a careful and meticulous survey of the museums the capital plays host to. An endless list. Perhaps it is only natural that this should be so: the capital gathers and gives voice to the cultural interests of a nation, yet I would never have imagined that a museum of razor blades existed, still less a museum of the Souls in Purgatory.
What else is there left to devote a museum to? If razor blades have already found a home, matches have not yet, at least not in Rome, because in Padova a museum of matches does exist, just as Verbania has its museum of the umbrella, Alessandria one of the hat and Novara one of the tap; nor is there any shortage of the museum of malaria, of horror, and so on. If I may suggest a game, go online and try pairing the word "museum" with any other word at all; you will certainly turn up an address, a place, an institution, a group, a private individual who has decided to give a home to some object or situation, indulging an anxious urge to bring everything into a system. Admittedly there is still no study devoted to the commonest swear word in our language; for that one has to go all the way to Reykjavik, but the path is now marked out.
In short, there is a great demand for museum makers, matched of course by a supply. Well, I am the supply. I am not the whole of it, but let us say that I represent the part which, because it often relies on advanced technology, is thought more modern and therefore more effective. Naturally I know full well that this is not so. But a misplaced faith in the future often leads us to credit the years ahead with bringing astonishing, miraculous things. Technology and the use of media tools have thus made their entrance into museums as well, sometimes timidly, sometimes overwhelmingly, and sometimes quite out of place.
The museum has certainly changed a great deal in recent years, from the time when its first purpose was the protection and conservation of the object. The museum was the place of cataloguing, made by experts for experts, who regarded the public as an intruder. Every caption accompanying each object on display was meant for an audience of specialists and used a strictly scientific language. I use the past tense, although, to tell the truth, this is still the attitude held in the vast majority of our country's museums. The only exception concerns those museums aimed at children and adolescents, the only visitors granted the right to be ignorant. Only in this case, in fact, is particular attention paid to language.
The change came with the great exhibitions that began touring Europe about thirty years ago. These were shows of international standing, with careful and enticing displays that soon set a trend and were imitated. Even the museums hosting special exhibitions gradually began to adopt the same methods for their permanent collections. Meanwhile the great expositions and trade fairs began to be taken as a model, and the museum, with its inevitable shops and restaurants, became a place in which to spend one's free time. In this way a merchandising grew up around the subject of the exhibition or the museum, so as to obtain an economic return, given the ever rising costs of the displays. With the arrival of new managerial complexities, new skills became necessary, alongside those of the traditional scientific staff, and they are the very skills of the communication industry, or of any industry whatever. Indeed the full organisation chart of a museum now includes a marketing director, a head of communications, a press officer and a public relations office. Yet the moment one decides to build a museum from scratch or to mount a temporary exhibition, outside skills have to be added: the deviser of the concept, the architecture practice, the media display company.
The success of a museum or of a temporary exhibition depends not only on the quality of those involved in the work, but also and above all on how well they work together. Despite the variety of exhibition types, one normally tends to draw a first distinction based on the subject of the show. The exhibition and the museum do not always aim to display objects; often the subject is a theme or a topic. In the first case one tends to play down the contribution of the display designers, since the object is assumed to speak for itself. The lights and the pedestals are looked after, panels with captions and biographical notes are prepared, but one tends to go no further. In the second case, on the other hand, the role of the installation is generally held to be more important. The director of a museum often has (or at least ought to have) a precise idea of how to hang a Cezanne exhibition, whereas, when it comes to a museum of emigration, he tends to rely on outside specialists. Having had experience of both situations, I have become convinced that the distinction drawn from the subject is mistaken, because an exhibition is always a staging, whether of Cezanne's paintings or of the history of emigration. The greatest difficulty in the early stages of the project is to bring the client round to the idea that what is really being mounted is a "show". People take fright at this word, or are even scandalised by it, but in reality, like it or not, it is a genuine piece of staging; nothing so different from a Site Specific installation.
The meeting with the client is a very delicate moment in the work, because it is here that one grasps what the museum's aims are, who its public will be, what tools will be available for the project, what the spaces are and, naturally, how large the budget is. Once these essential points are clear, the sense of the operation has to be defined: is the aim to explain or to move? Should one inform, and how deeply? Should one astonish, or is it better to play? Will the museum be interactive, or will the visitor decide the pace and the places?
Once the sense and the purpose of the project have been settled, the collaboration begins with the scientific side, which supplies the information relating to the theme, explains its terms, sets out the iconographic material available, the objects, the contributions in general, in short everything that might be usable in the show. At this point one can move on to working out the concept and then to the drawing up of the detailed design by the architecture practice or the set designer. This design contains the basic idea for the exhibition and the technical analysis needed to realise it, calculates the viewing times in front of each single station, decides the language to be used, and forecasts the costs and the timescale. Once it has been submitted to the client and the design has been approved, work can begin.

A detailed design does not yet go into the finer points, it does not show the graphics and the lettering, it is not yet quoted in measurements and weights, but it clearly conveys what some call, with an overblown term, the philosophy of the exhibition. This is the typical production chain of a contract for a museum installation. But one is not always so fortunate. In the case of the Museo dell'Emigrazione built in Gualdo Tadino, I was called in once the work had already started: the museum already had a collection of objects to do with emigration, above all work tools and, naturally, suitcases. Objects of undoubted interest which, however, displayed with a simple descriptive caption, lost their meaning. Set instead within a story, as pieces of the scenery of a narrative route, they became very effective. The iconographic material was extremely interesting: photographs, original film footage, travel documents, almost all donated by local people.
I therefore decided to make what is called an "emotional museum", separating the informational part from the emotional one. The information has its own space at five different points in the museum, where a silent display recounts, with images and short phrases, matters bound up with the theme of emigration. The emotional part occupies the ground floor wall, where a display of about 12x2 metres tells the story of emigration in a "show" (that is what it is called in the trade) lasting about 8 minutes. In all my installations I try to use a projection format far from the television standard, which uses proportions of 4/3 or 16/9, so as to avoid the automatic association with the television image. In the case of the projection we are dealing with, it is rather as if at home we had a television set reduced in height by 80%, in short a long, narrow strip.
The other topics are handled using, in some cases, video projectors or monitors, a few of them half hidden inside some of the suitcases. In no case are there captions, still less opening or closing titles, because the images speak for themselves and any explanation would be superfluous. The deeper treatment of the theme has to be dealt with elsewhere. An exhibition or a museum should not replace a publication; if anything they should prompt people to read, that is, to go deeper by the right means: the book. The museum, thanks also to intelligent management, has become the museum of the town, the museum the whole town has visited. But above all it is the museum that the townspeople helped to build, with steady participation, through donations and testimonies, and which keeps an important memory of the history of the town and the region
The situation in Assisi is quite different, where I designed an installation aimed at tourists that speaks about the town. Set in a room at the entrance to the Pinacoteca comunale, the installation is meant to present the lesser known Assisi, one rarely taken in by the usual itineraries of the pilgrim and the visitor.
That is precisely the aim: to provide prompts for going deeper and to give information useful for organising and streamlining a visit to the town.
The installation obviously does not replace a visit, which in any case is already under way; it does, however, try to bring to light more hidden stories, no less interesting for that, allowing us above all to show, through video graphics, what cannot be seen, because it has fallen into ruin through time or been replaced by later buildings.

The installation, which I have called Assicity, is a project of integrated and coordinated communication in the service of the user. The space is divided into 4 main areas: the outer window, the virtual studio, the in-depth bar, the Franciscan route. The first area is that of the outer window. Set slightly back from the level of the street and therefore sheltered from the direct rays of the sun, it makes for a formidable draw. From the street a monitor can be seen facing passers-by, sending out what we might call a genuine "trailer" lasting about 30", inviting passers-by to enter the Pinacoteca and to visit the installation, as well as, of course, the Pinacoteca itself. The second area is that of the virtual studio and is made up of 3 screens. The main one measures 400x250 cm and is mounted on a stage at a height of about 120cm. It is in this area that the main communication takes place. Here an actor/archaeologist, or archaeologist/actor, sets out the four themes chosen by the production: Roman Assisi, medieval Assisi, that of the modern period and that of our own day. The video projects the image of the presenter at a one to one scale, giving the audience the feeling of having a flesh and blood figure speaking from a stage. The large screen is in fact placed above a stage that recalls a little that of a theatre. This part of the film was shot in a studio that uses the green screen, that is to say a studio whose walls and background are painted a particular green that the computer graphics make disappear, leaving the filmed subject floating in the black. At this point, into this black, all the images we like can be inserted. In our case I arranged for six screens, a kind of television set of the future made of nothing but transparent glass, to surround the presenter, who can, with a magic gesture Mandrake would have said, summon them, move them or enlarge them. To give a point of reference, the effect recalls the one seen in the film Minority Report.
There are then two further screens placed one opposite the other. The first holds the images in 2D, the second those in 3D. The latter, hung suspended in the air, is a transparent screen made with a special glass, which gives back the feeling that the images float in the void, as if it were a moving hologram. Here the 3D reconstructions of the ancient monuments are projected, and also a map, likewise three dimensional, of the town, made by a 3D graphics studio specialising in architectural modelling. Their reconstructions are perfect in every single detail, so perfect as to look fake. That is why all their work was afterwards passed to another firm specialising in puppet graphic, literally graphics with puppets, which "dirtied" the images, distorting the lines and altering the perspective and the proportions of scale. Some will surely think that we were not able to produce a proper reconstruction, but it hardly matters. It is not easy to explain special effects in words, and you will forgive me if not everything is clear to you, but you might take it as an invitation to come and see it in person.
The third area is that of the in-depth bar and is made up of 4 monitors matching the 4 themes under discussion. These subjects are set out through animated graphics, recalling the so-called flash animations typically used on the more graphically pretentious websites. Here more data are provided and itineraries proposed that can steer the viewer towards less obvious destinations. The last area is that of the Franciscan itinerary, built as a narrow counter shaped like an "L", which marks the perimeter of the installation with a surface printed on opaline plexiglass. Walking along this itinerary the viewer retraces the places of Franciscanism. The route is illustrated, besides the graphics printed on plexiglass, also by Photo Frame devices that play on a loop small presentations of the places, with photographs, drawings and other visual material. The whole installation is fully accessible to those with impaired mobility.
This installation involves no interactivity. Without being opposed to interactivity in principle, I believe this word and this function are often abused. Sometimes interactivity made of question and answer touch screen is very useful, above all for buying tickets at the station, but I have rarely seen a truly useful use of this tool in museums. And yet a person/machine interaction is asked for more and more often, in the hope of obtaining through it the fullest engagement. But the virtue and the flaw of interaction is that it entails a one to one relationship. If the number of stations is limited, congestion is a risk; while one person acts, the others watch. Interaction, instead, must be quick, must last only a little, must astonish at least somewhat, and above all must serve some purpose and not merely show off the wonders of technology. For my part, the interaction I prefer is not the one mediated by technology, but the one that instead has you use the most everyday things and gestures, opening windows or drawers, moving objects, turning wheels. What matters is that the engagement be real and that a visit to a museum become an experience, stir an emotion and teach something.
The museum cannot have an exhaustive function with respect to the subject it treats; in my view it should not say everything and cannot contain all the knowledge around this matter. An exhibition is simply the representation of this knowledge, and the representation of knowledge is not so different from a show.

Antonio Venti, director and video artist, makes video installations in Italy and abroad. With Davide Franceschini he published Il lavoro del collettivo formazero nell'orizzonte della cultura site-specific (in Teatri luoghi citta, edited by Raimondo Guarino, Officina, Roma, 2008).