The Ecomuseum

What it is, who made it, why it began in a school and why it lives on the internet.

What an ecomuseum is

The term “ecomuseum” was coined by Hugues de Varine in 1971 to describe a particular territory that takes in traditional living environments together with a natural, artistic and cultural heritage worth protecting and promoting.

The real creator of the ecomuseum, however, was the museologist Georges Henri Rivière, who described it as “the museum of the time and the space of a given territory, an institution whose task is to study, preserve and give value to the collective memory of a community and of the land that houses it”.

An ecomuseum is not bounded by walls, and the “works on show” are not only objects of everyday life but also the landscapes, the architecture and the oral record of tradition. Its first aim is to give value to the identity of a given territory through a network of museums, exhibitions and places of historical, artistic and natural interest spread across that same territory.

Artistic and environmental heritage

The artistic heritage and the environmental heritage of a territory are both part of its cultural heritage: the whole body of cultural, artistic, environmental, architectural, archival and archaeological assets.

The artistic heritage can be understood as the sum of all the works and monuments, movable and immovable, that hold artistic value or considerable historical weight. Environmental assets, on the other hand, are recognised as chorographic areas — representative of a given region, from the Greek “kora” — which make up landscapes either natural or shaped by human hands. There are two kinds: “individual beauties”, which hold a particular intrinsic value of their own, and “collective beauties”, the natural forms or buildings that must be protected as integral parts of a valuable unified whole.

Why give value to a territory

If one has any sense of belonging to one's own territory, giving value to it has to be seen as a duty, something to be expected of anyone with a civic conscience. But why does it matter so much?

One answer has to do with the economy: a kind of territorial marketing can be built on tourism. But giving value to a territory also means acting on its cultural heritage, conferring worth on all the assets that make it up. In short, giving value to a territory means taking it on as an identity, as a factor of belonging and communication; and increasing that value also means carrying it outwards, to those who do not yet know it.

The project that made it possible

The project “un #ECOMUSEO per l'#ABRUZZO” was funded by the European Structural Funds — PON, the Italian National Operational Programme “For schools: skills and learning environments” 2014-2020, public call 4427 of 2 May 2017, “Strengthening education in cultural, artistic and landscape heritage”.

Funded on 29 March 2018 and started in the autumn of that same year, it ran over two school years and five interconnected modules, with classes from the Liceo Artistico and the Liceo Classico taking part.

The aims: to teach pupils to respect the environmental and cultural heritage and to give value to it; to set up a participatory research process; to understand the interaction between people and environment and the way landscape changes; to identify the features that matter most to local identity; to prepare students to act as guides in museums and historic centres; to create a new form of cultural and tourist promotion.

Who worked on it

Coordinator and driving force of the project: Giuseppe Manzi, architect and teacher of art history, a scholar of landscape and local history, who devised and designed several of the museum systems in the area.

• Elena La Morgia — education in cultural and environmental heritage, types of museum system, art and the promotion of the territory;
• Aurelio Manzi — environmental and landscape education in the Sangro-Aventino area;
• Davide Aquilano — archaeological remains;
• Maria Elena Sigismondi — architectural, historical and landscape features;
• Stefano Donatello — the conception and design of art objects;
• Ercole del Pizzo — building the multimedia site;
• Carmela Pelleriti, Concetta Di Campli, Silvia Intilangelo, Eugenia Napoleone — tutors.

With them, and above all, the students: they are the ones who visited the places, wrote the texts, took the photographs and drew the plans and elevations found in these pages.

Why virtual

The coordinator's words are blunt: in a world where the population gathers in metropolitan areas and the means of communication are more and more in the hands of the dominant urban culture, the only hope of making the voice of those outside heard is communication over the internet. The more isolated one is, the more essential and effective this kind of communication becomes — above all for those without financial resources.

A virtual ecomuseum therefore makes it possible to put forward an alternative culture; to take back one's own identity; to build direct, participatory knowledge; to spread one's own culture in order to break out of isolation and look for common ground; to identify the resources of the territory and so to guide one's own studies and plans.

The ecomuseum is a new dimension in time and space of one's own territory, a way of preserving its collective memory and giving it value through study and comparison.

This website

The pages you are reading are a new edition of the original work: the texts and the photographs are those collected by the students and their teachers, reorganised for reading on screen and set in relation to one another through a map and six themed itineraries. Nothing has been added to the substance of the content.