Who made this Ecomuseum

It was not born in a council department. It was born in a secondary school, between 2018 and 2019, from students sent out to look at their own land with the eyes of those who will decide its future.

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, on strengthening education in cultural, artistic and landscape heritage.

Funded on 29 March 2018, it began in the autumn of that year with class 3B of the Liceo Artistico and a number of pupils from classes 3A, 3C and 3D of the Liceo Classico. It ran over two school years and five interconnected modules.

Five modules

Education in cultural and environmental heritage; environmental and landscape education in the Sangro-Aventino area; types of museum system, with the adoption of the Gypsum Museum and the Sweet Pepper Museum; archaeological, architectural, historical and landscape features; and finally the building of the multimedia site, so that the students could run it themselves over time.

The specialists were chosen by open call: Elena La Morgia, architectural historian and teacher of art history; Aurelio Manzi, science teacher and scholar of the farmed and natural landscape; Giuseppe Manzi, teacher of art history, who devised and designed several of the museum systems in the area and coordinated the project; Davide Aquilano, archaeologist; Maria Elena Sigismondi, architect and researcher; Stefano Donatello, teacher of sculpture and modelling; Ercole del Pizzo for the multimedia work. With them the tutors Carmela Pelleriti, Concetta Di Campli, Silvia Intilangelo and Eugenia Napoleone.

Why an ecomuseum, and why virtual

The term “ecomuseum” was coined by Hugues de Varine in 1971 to describe a territory that takes in traditional living environments together with a natural, artistic and cultural heritage worth protecting. But the real creator 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: they are also the landscapes, the architecture, the oral record of tradition.

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

The students' own words

The natural setting around us is majestic. The resources for a greater development of our region are before our eyes every day, but it is precisely because we do not know them that we undervalue them, or ignore them altogether.

The Ecomuseum is organised in six sections — environment and landscape, architecture, archaeology, history and art, museums, local produce and food — and each section holds texts, captioned photographs, drawings and sketches. To carry it beyond national borders, the original work included translations into English and some summaries in Chinese: for the first time, language learning was put to practical use, to make one's own culture known to others.