Italy will open a new mafia museum, with smells and sounds

Italy plans to open a mafia museum at several sites chronicling “the stories and sacrifices” of the country’s fight against organized crime, organizers say. The first site in Palermo, a former stronghold of the Sicilian mafia, should open this spring. The exhibitions will include works on loan from major Italian museums and archival materials such as documents, films and photographs. Sounds and smells will also be used to bring visitors to life key moments in Mafia history.

The museum was imagined by the anti-mafia charity Fondazione Falcone and will be created with private and public funds. It follows a major public art project staged in Palermo by the foundation last year, in which bold displays around the city, including a reclining tree in a roofless church with carved figures of victims mobs stuck to its leafless branches, and an automated excavator arm digging into a cement base – marked the 30th anniversary of the murder of anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone with a car bomb in Palermo.

recognize courage

The first site of the new museum will be housed in the neoclassical 18th-century Palazzo Jung in Palermo. Its inauguration will coincide with this year’s anniversary of Falcone’s assassination, on May 23, says curator Alessandro De Lisi. The arts journal. Two other sites will include a museum in a historic residential building in central Rome that was confiscated from the mafia, and a coworking space in Bolzano for art and design professionals, as well as political and environmental researchers.

“It will not just be a museum of memory, but also a dynamic place where people can meet,” said Maria Falcone, the sister of the late Giovanni and president of the Fondazione Falcone, in a press release for the site. of the museum in Palermo. “For us, it’s a way of recognizing the courage of a city that over the years has found the strength to stand up to criminal activity, with civic passion, social responsibility and cultural independence.”