Since antiquity and Rome’s conquest of most of Europe and the Mediterranean, Italy has exerted an influence and fascination that is as lasting as it is profound. Few words can conjure up such a rich and abundant imagination, from the buried splendours of Pompeii to the prestige of the urban centres of the Renaissance, from the canals of Venice to the splendours of Papal Rome. Alongside this Italy, as prestigious as it is today for tourists, another, more modest, but just as diverse and creative, can be drawn: that of its people, their daily lives and festivals, their beliefs and customs, and their costumes and crafts. 

The manifestations of traditional popular lifestyles have been maintained for longer in the less wealthy regions of Italy, those that have been marked only belatedly by the great transformations of modern and industrial society, and also by tourism. It is therefore in the south of the country and in the high Alpine valleys that many of the objects presented here were collected, often by ethnologists who went on field trips to Calabria and the Aosta Valley in the same way as they might have done in Africa and the Amazon. 

Even in these regions, most of the elements that characterised traditional societies disappeared in the second half of the 20th century – as elsewhere in Europe. Other elements of so-called “popular culture” were then studied and collected by museums, such as football and graffiti. They are representative of a shift linked to the disappearance of traditional societies and the rural exodus that accompanied it: the people studied are no longer those of the countryside and villages, but rather those of the big cities.

The Mucem thus makes a bid to portray another Italy, just as generations of researchers, ethnologists and curators tried to do through the constitution of these collections, patiently carried out since the 1880s.
 

—Curation:
Raphaël Bories, custodian for heritage, head of the Religions and beliefs Unit, Mucem

With the support of les amis du Mucem