MUSEO DEL VITTORIANO

Museo del Vittoriano

The Vittoriano Museum is a museum complex in the city of Rome located inside the Vittoriano monument which includes the famous “Altare della Patria”. In collaboration with the MIC (Italian Ministry of Culture) and EMBT Palzom curated within the structure the audiovisual exhibition “Lessico Italiano, volti e storie del nostro Paese”, creating captivating audiovisual installations in Rome’s historic complex. Experience 36 unique and immersive installations, from historical documentaries to conceptual videos and animated panels.

The purpose of the exhibition was to depict Italian identity through an audio-visual journey, thus narrating the past, present, and future of Italian identity to both young people and children, who may not yet be familiar with history, using the vivid language of moving images and sounds. A recurring theme, akin to a common thread, was the significant collective effort required for the birth of a democracy.

We illustrated the labor behind our existence as free men and women, in a free and democratic country, conscious of our history, the history of our language, and the processes we underwent to create a free and democratic state, where work and the free expression of ideas are safeguarded.

The exhibition’s 36 installations involved numerous different artists and utilized diverse artistic languages and registers, ranging from immersive documentaries to video art and video installations. The visual journey of the exhibition was accompanied by a soundtrack of music and voices. This continuous and omnipresent soundtrack allowed the viewer to immerse themselves in the themes, sometimes creating a dreamlike atmosphere, at other times assuming a solemn character, through suspensions, moments of reflection, crescendos, and diminuendos, becoming a sensory substrate that permeated the entire journey.

In the room dedicated to Leonardo Da Vinci, we wanted to tell the story behind the incredible inventions and works of this great genius, who was capable of transcending all boundaries and divisions between various arts and sciences, becoming a worldwide icon for the vastness of his scientific and artistic creations.

We brought to life some pages of the Codex Arundel, preserved at the British Library, that marvelous document of over 570 handwritten pages, with Leonardo’s characteristic right-to-left writing, in which the Tuscan genius worked for years on many of his inventions and futuristic projects.

This digital animated representation of the great fathers of Italian language and literature concluded the first part of the exhibition.

In the room dedicated to dialects, we decided to tell their story through poetry, an art that transcends time, and together with Sofia Mattioli, we developed an audiovisual installation giving voice and images to 5 fragments of poems from 5 Italian regions.

We then asked 5 great Italian photographers, particularly linked to those regions, to provide evocative images of the areas described, and 5 actors from the same regions as the poets to read their poems so that their voices and dialectal intonations could describe, as realistically as possible, that Italian identity stemming from the strength of language.

Gradually, the sound journey, created by the voices of dialectal actors, evolved into our unitary language, once again narrated in its gradual process of formation, through the broadcasts of Maestro Manzi teaching Italian in the early RAI television programs. In the same context, there was also an installation on the words of Don Milani and Maria Montessori, who have played significant roles in our cultural history.

These great educators dedicated themselves to the youth of our country and shaped those individuals who later became the navigators and explorers of our time, those who, through curiosity and the desire for knowledge, pushed beyond every limit, often surpassing all records.

In this installation, there was an audio representation of the voices of the many Italian migrants who, in order to feed their families, migrated to foreign lands, enduring unheard-of hardships and miseries. To represent migrations, we decided to use sensory and visual evocations, narrating the continuous flow of peoples through images of moving water.

This uninterrupted migratory flow, which characterizes the human species and directly involves our country from ancient times, was represented by images of the sea in three different formats. Footage of the sea on film was juxtaposed with footage of the sea in digital format to evoke both the ancient and current history of migrants from our country.

There was then a room dedicated to the frieze of the Navigators, painted in a more complete and detailed manner than the previous ones, where the explosion of colors gives way to quadraphonic sound.

The journey continued into the room of the Presidents of the Republic, who symbolize our identity and are the guardians of freedom and democracy. Images of all our Presidents were projected in these installations, not as individual figures, but as a single historical phenomenon, a unitary representation of our democratic ideals, capable of gradually transforming the past into the present and the present into the future.

To represent the Constituent Process and evoke the enthusiasm of the protagonists of that great, incredible work, we used images of the speech given by Piero Calamandrei at the closure of the Constituent Assembly. The images are taken from the Archive of the Istituto Luce and are expressed through the voice of a Florentine actor. Finally, to describe the Italian Magistracy, we used the voices of those courageous magistrates who, aware of their task, did not allow themselves to be intimidated and even gave their lives to protect the legality and democracy that are the foundation of our civil life.

In the room dedicated to work, we celebrated the importance of labor as the founding value of our society. We sought to pay homage to those who work tirelessly throughout their lives to allow their children and their children’s children to live a peaceful life.

Personal sacrifices become collective and form a society of people who, thanks to the hard work of their fathers, live in prosperity.