CITY OF MONZA MUSEUM
THE STRATEGIES


The City of Monza Museum can be summed up in three expressions:
· Index Museum
· Gateway Museum
· Flexible Museum

The museum is intended to be a kind of index of Monza’s history book, an index containing the themes that have created the image of the city over the years and which can find in the space allotted to the museum (about 350 sm) space to be evoked, shown off and opened for further development.
The museum is intended to be a Gateway to the area, its culture, its wealth of historic artistic heritage. Somewhere to get one’s bearings and then go and find out about the places, treasures and documents displayed during the museum visit.
As a whole the museum is presented as a structure with various functions ( a place for safekeeping, displaying and communicating exhibitions, teaching) which merge with the various services offered to the public (museum visit, cultural events, teaching occasions, bookshop, multi-media stations, coffee bar, educational space, temporary exhibitions) without this plethora of offers depriving the museum of its intended narrative function.

The museum visit can be divided into themes:
· Roman and Longobard Roots
· Entrepreneurial flair
· Internationalism
· Religious and administrative character
· “salubriouness”

The themes are linked together through the River Lambro and its importance in the city’s growth.
The themes have been chosen with the collaboration of scholars who have long devoted research to Monza, with the aim of telling a story that seals its identity through history up to the present.
Starting from these themes, objects have been selected for exhibition, multi-medial integrations, installations and other instruments important for narration from the museum angle, surfing the internet.
Every theme becomes a chance to get to know more about the life of the area, with openings to be developed through multi-medial stations.
Investigating the themes will lead to discovering other places and institutions in the city and surrounding territory, where the themes selected can be pursued in greater and richer detail in terms of objects to see and places to visit.

The project for the City of Monza Museum rests on the idea of museum as story-teller rather than object container. This means not just exhibiting the objects available to us today (which are not many in fact) so much as using them symbolically, to stand for an entire category of objects and “knowledge” , and thus render them useful for illuminating a path that will take advantage of many narrative codes and consequently of different means such as:
· archeological and historical objects
· explanatory panels and captions for the objects
· screens and films
· set ups to help the public enter into the history of Monza and to make the museum visit more involving
· stations for deeper cultural study

11 slides from the presentation of the project, in collaboration with Silvia Osculati