It’s easy for a big museum to make the news; among the ones to get recent headline space here were Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum with a ground-breaking exhibit on the Netherlands’ colonial past and Norway’s National Museum with its delayed opening.
But it’s not often that a museum of everyday objects, including tools, packaging, crockery, clothing, whatever, can fight its way into the news. But the picture above is only a small sample of what’s on hand at the Ettore Guatelli Museum in Gaiano, Italy; the museum’s namesake long ago started collecting the objects to preserve remnants of ordinary Italian life for the future.
The Local.it recently published a collection of unusual small museums in Italy; they might be a good bookmark for those planning to visit Italy when the world is safe again.
Among the ones listed, some are expectable (a medieval torture room in San Gimignano, a museum of pasta in Rome, and an exhibit of ‘dirty pictures’ from Pompeii) but others show quite a bit of creativity. In Novara, there’s a museum of faucets; Castelbosco has one focusing on excrement, including not only its history and significance but also featuring artworks sculpted from it.
On a less disturbing level, Parma (where else?) has a museum dedicated to prosciutto and salami; Sciacca has a collection of 3,000 sculptures of human heads created by an artist after he was deemed too mentally sick to serve a WWII sentence for desertion. And, if brighter lights are what gets you going, Bologna has the Museo del Flipper. Not the friendly dolphin; this is about the kind of flipper you find on the side of the 400 pinball machines on display.
Image at Ettore Guatelli Museum by Leo Orlandidni/Wikimedia
