I've
been asked about "living" archeology or history sites
in Italy, meaning places that recreate the environment
of a particular culture at a certain point in history
in order to put you, the visitor, back in time and
give you the experience of being there. My
correspondent referred specifically to Colonial
Williamsburg, Virginia, in the USA and also to any
number of "Dude Ranches" in the western US where you
can saddle up and go play cowboy for a few hours
before moseying back in to a heated pool and great
brunch, just like the Good Old You Must Be Kidding
Days. The easy part first: indeed, horse country in
Italy is famous — as Buffalo Bill found out. It's
called Maremma, an area in Tuscany, where a shepherd
or cowboy was/is called a buttero (the
painting, above, I Butteri, is by Giovani
Fattori (1825-1908). They still exist in folk
festivals and dude ranches (that's where you come in
because any number of Agriturismi
will let you saddle up and go play Guffalo
Guglielmo before heading back in to the heated etc.
etc.
The second part — the "living museum" — is problematic. By definition,
you mean sites where you wander around and watch
costumed actors (or "interpreters") portray life from
an earlier time. You might see them cooking on an open
hearth, spinning wool and weaving, and farming without
modern equipment or working as blacksmiths, tanners,
printers, ...whatever. They may also serve as guides
and are prepared to field questions. The main feature
of living history museums, aside from the physical
plant, is the use of such costumed interpreters or
historians. There are really not that many. One of the
best I know of in Italy is the Archeodromo of
Poggibonsi (in Tuscany, near Siena, image, left).
The site claims in its literature to be "Italy’s first
open-air archaeology museum devoted to the early
Middle Ages," a reconstructed village from the time of
Charlemagne (the 800s). It is of the kind my
correspondent was talking about, using actors (or
"intrepreters"). Since it is so far removed in time,
it has none of the problems with historically
uncomfortable "authenticity" that Colonial Williamsbug
had when its section of largely 18th century colonial
homes cum interpreters opened in 1934 and
forgot to include the slaves!
That problem is not easily
dealt with especially in historical reenactments of
such things as military battles, where integrity and
historical authenticity come up against common sense.
I know they reenact US Civil War Battles (Gettysburg)
as well as ones from the Napoleonic Wars (Austerlitz)
and in Italy, any number of medieval knight-smashing
jousting bouts. The image (right) is a postage
stamp issued on the occasion of such a "re-evocation"
(the Italian term) of the Disfatta [rout, defeat] di Barletta.
The question, in terms of showing more recent history,
is: What are you acting out? If it is sanitized, then
why do it? And aren't some things that represent our
worst impulses better left dead? Trench warfare?
Dachau? (I agree that Nazi death camps should not be
expunged — as if they never existed
— that is censorship
by omission. Let Dachau stand where it is now and as
it is now (I choose an example that I have seen
personally): a museum of buildings, each one a grim
hulk of death, an appropriately insane reminder of the
worst we can do.
Reenactments of religious
events in Christian history are well-known. The
Passion Play or Easter pageant is a dramatic
presentation depicting the Passion of Jesus Christ:
his trial, suffering and death. It is a traditional
part of Lent in several Christian denominations,
particularly in the Roman Catholic tradition, in
hundreds of places throughout the word. In Italy, the
event at Sordevolo (region of Piedmont, about 60
kilometers / 37 mi northeast of Turin) is noteworthy.
It has been held every five years since 1816 by all
the inhabitants of the village. It takes place every 5
years in an open air amphitheater of 2,400 seats,
built to simulate a corner of Jerusalem (image,
above). Every actor involved (about 500 people)
is a volunteer as are those who work behind the scenes
(about 300 people) for scenography, costumes, script,
animal control, etc. About 40 shows are performed for
each season. The next edition will take place in 2020
(from 13th June to 27th September). In Italy most
villages have some sort of religious festival dealing
with local saints and involving in some way the entire
village dressed in period costumes. Are those living
museums? I'm not sure.
Most historical and
archeological sites in Italy with ambitions to educate
and inform go by various names (with overlap among
them) that I simply term "static". You walk in and
look around. They might be called open-air museums or
museums of buildings or folk museums. The important
thing here is the approach to the study of the past.
This approach views the goals of archeology and
anthropology as the same or at least very similar: to
seek answers to questions about how humans used to
live and not simply what their structures and tools
looked like, to focus on "the underlying historical
processes which are at the root of change." (in Renfrew, A.C., 1987, Archaeology
and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins,
London: Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6612-5) The current term is
"processual archeology" (formerly the "New
Archeology").
The idea of preserving the
past in some kind of museum goes back to the early
1800s in Scandinavia. Such museums are now found
throughout the world. As noted, they are duplicates of
old buildings, even entire villages. And factories,
such as the recent sites of so-called Industrial
Archeology at the mines in
Sardina (image, right). In 2001, the
regional government of Sardinia officially created the
“Geo-mining Historical and Environmental Park of
Sardinia,” primarily in the Iglesiente area in the
southwest (including the two islands off the coast).
The ambitious goal of the park is to "...recover
and maintain the entire set of mining
infrastructures for environmental, scientific,
educational, cultural and tourist purposes."
That park is now on the UNESCO Cultural Heritage list
as, collectively, one of our planetary artifacts that
should be saved because they remind us where we came
from. The UNESCO description
is here. So, now we have "geopark" and
"evironmental park" to add to the list of kinds of
museums.
The
much older view of archeology — dig it up and take it home — no
longer exists (I hope). That led to egregious episodes
of plunder such as what Sir
William Hamilton (1730-1803), Britain's Minister
Plenipotentiary to the court of Naples (image, left)
took from the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples, half of which
wound up in the British Museum with the other half
still at the bottom of the English channel. There is a
more home-grown version of looting described in the
clever Latin pun from the 1600s "Quod non fecerunt
Barbari fecerunt Barbarini." (What the
Barbarians didn't do, Barbarini did.) "Barbarians" is
clear, but Barbarini in Italian means "little
Barbarians, but was also the family name of Matteo
Barbarini before he was elected pope, becoming Urban
VIII (reigning from 1623 until his death in 1644). He
was very good at removing pieces of ancient Roman
architecture for his own purposes. He boasted of
taking the ancient bronze beams from the portico of
the Pantheon to procure bronze for the baldachin of
St. Peter's Basilica and for the papal cannon foundry.
When he then threatened to take stone from the Roman
Republic era mausoleum of Caecilia Metella on the
Appian Way to use in the Trevi Fountains, the people
of the area, very fond of their heritage, put their
foot down.
Italy
is full of open-air museums if you count such
well-known stalwarts of open-air antiquity in the
immediate area of Naples and Campania as Pompeii, Herculaneum, Paestum (image, right),
Velia, the Flavian amphitheater in
Pozzuoli, etc. Indeed, all of Italy might be
said to be a jig-saw collection of such museums. Since
the 1990s almost every piece of land in Italy that has
a piece of antiquity on or under it has been labelled
some kind of "park" —
local, provincial, regional, or national — the goal being to get some of the
money that trickles down from Mother Europe or even UNESCO. Many sites have active
digs still going on somewhere on the premises, and all
follow the rules of modern processual archaeology.
Carefully uncover it, and don't move it but study it
on site. Even the local lowest of the low (on the
trickle down funding scale from international to
national to state (regione in Italy) to
province (with its mere "archeological
park") can
still be as stunning as the photo at the upper
left: the Archeological Park of Posillipo, described here. From
below, it looks like this:
I really know the woman
sitting on the rock. She is Selene Salvi, a
marvelous painter as well as Kween of the Kayaks,
although not necessarily at the same time.
Besides religious events, Italy is full
of periodic reenactments of history, which might count
as a type of living museum, but I'm not sure. I'm
thinking of something like the Palio (contest) (image,
left) in Siena (in Tuscany). It is, in fact, a
medieval horse race put on at least twice a year by
costumed riders and horses representing their part of
the city and preceded by a historical procession. The
whole city turns into a museum, at least for a day or
two. Periodic processions along the canals of Venice
in medieval gondolas also come to mind.
Closer to Naples, near the
town of Latina on the west coast above Terracina,
about 100 miles north of Naples, you find the Piana delle Orme musem,
which declares itself to be a "museum of Italian
agricultural and military history." Next to the sign
at the entrance that says this is a center of agriturismo
is a jet fighter plane. "Eclectic" doesn't begin to
describe the place. They started packing stuff into
the premises and simply never stopped. They have
guides, but not costumed "interpreters."
There
are also such things as the reconstructions of the
homes of famous persons. (No doubt a long list.) The
best known such site in Italy is the estate, now a
giant museum, dedicated to Giuseppe Garibaldi (image,
left), Italy's greatest patriotic hero. It is on
the small island of Caprera, in the Maddalena archipelago off of
north-eastern Sardina. Actually, it isn't on the
island. It is the island, now joined by a
causeway to the rest of Sardinia so you can drive
instead of sail over the way Garibaldi had to
do.
A delightful open-air
museum — one that most
tourists know nothing about — is the trail of English forts,
one of which is seen here (image,
right) placed high over the sea at intervals
along the cliffs of the west coast of the Isle of
Capri, that is, at the Anacapri side of the island.
They stretch from the lighthouse in the SW for about
2-3 miles (about 3500 meters) to the Blue Grotto side
of the island in the NW. There are two entries in
these pages on that. The first is
here. The second entry is here and makes
mention of the unique open-air ceramic library of
Sergio Rubino, an artist from the town of Anacapri.
The library consists of about 200 exquisite ceramic
plaques (such as the one shown in the image, upper
left) set amid the flora, each containing a
painted image and description of a local plant or
bird; as well, there are a few about the forts,
themselves. The whole thing, forts and library, is, in
my view, too open-air. It's totally
unprotected. But it is unique.
I'm pretty sure there is no
such place in Italy as the Fuggerei in Augsburg,
Germany, brought to my attention by Prof. Warren
Johnson of that city. It is the oldest social housing
project in the world (totally and authentically
rebuilt from the bombardments of WWII). It is
inhabited today, and the rents have not been raised
since 1520! In Naples, we have some rent controls
still intact since the end of World War II. Around
here, that's forever.
