Civic Museum
Questo post è disponibile anche in:
Italiano
🎧 STAGE 2 – THE CIVIC MUSEUM OF BISACQUINO: MEMORY BECOMES MATTER
Our journey continues to the Bisacquino Civic Museum, a symbol of the desire to preserve and transmit the country’s historical, craft and anthropological memory. Officially founded on August 12, 1984, the museum was born thanks to the tireless work of a group of volunteers coordinated by Totuccio Salvaggio, then area head of cultural heritage.
Since the 1970s, these volunteers began collecting objects and tools that testified to Bisacquino’s rural and artisan life, often saving them from abandonment.
After an initial setup in the basement of the Polyclinic, the museum found its final location in the former Capuchin convent, built in 1633. A building that, because of its historical structure and location, lends itself well to being the custodian of the community’s material and intangible memory.
The museum is now divided into as many as 16 sections, including those of Paleontology, Archaeology, Ethnoanthropology, Contemporary Art, Musical Instruments and the section dedicated to the great filmmaker Frank Capra, a native of Bisacquino.
Particularly relevant to our itinerary is the archaeological section, which collects artifacts found on Mount Triona and in the surrounding area: ceramics, tools, coins and instruments that attest to a millennia-old presence and offer valuable clues about the daily life of the ancient civilizations that inhabited these lands.
Alongside these artifacts we find tools of rural life, implements of ancient trades, and faithful environmental reconstructions that give us back the atmosphere of nineteenth-century Bisacquino: from carpenters’ and blacksmiths’ workshops to folk kitchens and rural bedrooms.
Today the Civic Museum is not only an exhibition space, but a living cultural center, a place for meetings, studies, workshops and seminars. A real workshop of memory that dialogues with other museum and cultural realities. It is here that history becomes tangible, among objects, documents, photographs and stories that speak the language of our identity.
The Museum thus becomes a key stop on our itinerary: a treasure chest that holds the signs of time, the deep roots of the community, and prepares us to ascend toward Mount Triona, in search of the oldest traces.
