by Sara Conforti*
I have followed with interest the debate relating to the destination of the Palazzina Marfisa d’Este and the activities that can and must be carried out inside the residence, the loggia and the adjacent rooms.
Feedback from the municipal administration that an attempt is being made to correct the situation compared to the first not particularly cautious declarations which seemed to suggest a distortion of the arrangements and an inappropriate use of the premises. All doubts regarding what the intervention will really entail have not yet been dispelled.
The Administration has only now discovered the actions of one of our illustrious fellow citizens in a reductive manner. Nino Barbantini in the twentieth century (not in the eighteenth century as the councilor escaped in his press note) was an active member of Ferrariae Decus, a friend of Giuseppe Agnelli, and together with him he designed and invented the “house museum” of Palazzina Marfisa. He curated the exhibition of Ferrara Renaissance painting (1933); an exhibition for which Federico Zeri declared: “It is the first and also the most beautiful of the ancient art exhibitions held in Italy”. An exhibition that aroused the applause of Bernard Berenson. Venice remembered him in two conferences, the last in 2023, in which no cultural manager of our Municipality and no institutional figure took part to testify to Barbantini’s value for the city.
Our heritage does not require any upheaval to increase the number of its visitors; on the contrary, the essence of the places must be sought and valorised and it is all the more essential to promote, in that direction, projects which respect their history, thus making them alive, to use the councilor’s words.
The Palazzina was conceived by Barbantini as a cultural model that was to serve to make the Este culture manifest, an interpretative key placed for future memory. I believe that is where the guideline for the intervention should now be found.
I hope that the project in its details will soon be made public and will be allowed to Ferrariae Decus, protagonist together with Bper Banca of the exhibition project on which we are intervening and to the associations, primarily those most involved such as the Amici dei Musei and Italia Nostra , a participatory role, even if unfortunately a little late.
I believe that a project of this magnitude should have been shared from the initial stages with these interlocutors, who I hope, unlike us, already have some more elements to evaluate the coherence of the intervention.
The entire heritage of the city must be thought of as a complex system not as a set of realities autonomous from each other. One of the themes of my electoral campaign will be the establishment of a permanent forum of cultural associations with a consultative nature for the Department of Culture and Tourism (delegations which I hope will be reunited soon) and a table involving all museum directors of the city, so that interventions are coordinated, concerted and coherent. Associations must be privileged and never absent interlocutors in cultural policy choices. For each museum and monument its particular vocation must be defended as part of a multi-voiced story of a city that wants to be unique. Then for Palazzina Marfisa d’Este it will not be necessary to insert other collections or activities that alter the meaning of the place but to make the deeper and more complicated effort to imagine a project that makes the identity of the Palazzina even stronger, more evident and clear in the complex museum panorama of Ferrara, also cleaning it from the alterations of which we have no knowledge or memory.
A project of this type, with a strong identity for the city, would be aimed at schools and universities in a privileged way, but it could be an excellent starting point for the creation, promotion and marketing of a tourist itinerary that puts the historic homes and stately buildings of the city, with the hope that other projects, soon, will be able to give citizens and tourists the definitive and permanent opening of Casa Minerbi – Dal Sale, of Palazzo di Renata di Francia (striking an agreement with the University that allows public use of the spaces) and of Palazzo Massari, whose project was stopped due to a change which was not necessary and whose fate, to date, is very unclear, just as we are preparing to lose part of the Castle for restoration.
*Candidate for City Council – Delegate for Culture of the Democratic Party
