ear Readers,[br]
« Ceci n’est pas un musée » – this is not a museum. This could be our motto for next year, or even for the next few years. The citation, inspired by the famous Magritte’s drawing depicting a pipe below which you can read “this is not a pipe”, suits Paestum on several levels. The first is that, while on Paestum’s museum is written in large letters MVSEO, actually it is a lot more. The main body of the museum building is the 1:1 reconstruction of the sacellum from which the sculpted panels (metope) found in Hera’s shrine on the river Sele in 1934 are said to originate. Paestum is therefore, rather than a museum, a temple – a true augmented reality experiment dating back to the early post WW2 period, with the original metope still mounted on the “cell”, as it is believed they were mounted in the first half of the VI century BC.[br]
At a more mundane level, Paestum is not a museum because it is also and most of all an archeological site, one of the most complex monumental parks of its kind.[br]
But for me, the quote “this is not a museum” has yet another more profound meaning: I think it is fair to say, maybe with a touch of conceit, that the activities we carry out distinctly surpass what a traditionally perceived museum does. I am referring for instance to the visits to the storage facilities, which we are revising to increase them even. I am also referring to the Paestum Viva project, which entails free workshops every day of the week (except Monday) in the museum – actually, in the “temple” mentioned above. Not to mention the lessons, conferences, stratigraphic excavations, book presentations, shows, concerts, wine tasting and Mediterranean Diet laboratories, dancing and DJs in the archaeological area, walks, guided tours by day and by night, courses, meetings, debates … so I really think it is difficult to find a cultural institution which covers such a wide range of types of initiatives. This is not to say we are the best at what we do, but we are surely among the freer. Therefore, more than a museum, we are a “cultural machine” going at full speed and which, in interacting with citizens and guests from all over the world reinvents itself continuously, translating the ambiguity of the word “museum” (what does it mean exactly?) into freedom of expression with a high inclusive and social value. Vive la liberté![br][br]
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Director of Paestum Archaeological Park