Prospettive per un Museo Archeologico

This introductory essay examines the premises to the planning of the Archaeological and Ethnographical Museum of Modica, in the more general framework of the local area. The necessity is emphasized to conceive a Museum for everyone and to reinterpret the collections in the light of the attempts to construct an authentic myth of the local territory and of its history, centralized, evidently, on its main cultural resource, and that is on archeology. Unlike the museal exhibition, pushingly drawing towards renovation, the architecture of museums shows a certain resistance against any revamping. It is necessary to work out the antithesis between maintaining the character of a historical building and its using in order to meet the communcative and contextualizing requests of the collection. Nowadays, the exhibition project, supported by the most technologically up-to-date “know how”, has achieved a total compositional and expressive freedom, moving between the separation from the ‘container’ structure and the respect of its interpretation, never missing the main purpose of the project, which is the presentation of the collections.