A cryptographic challenge for children and teenagers aged 7 to 12 and an unprecedented guided tour of poetic and musical improvisations are the two events connected to the exhibition “Forbidden Enigma. Secrets and eroticism in the encrypted poem by Pietro Giannone” scheduled for Saturday 11 and Sunday 12 May at the Civic Museum of Modena.
On Saturday 11 May, at 4pm, for children and young people aged 7 to 12, the traveling game “Coded Messages… the challenge continues!” starts. which is part of the exhibition itinerary, already designed to involve even the youngest audience through a cryptographic game. During the guided tour, participants, following the “coded messages” guide symbol, will find the key word to enter the secret room forbidden to adults where new surprises await them: to make the challenge even more exciting, they will have to discover the clues that hidden among the rhymes of poetic language and which will lead them to explore the museum even outside the exhibition. At the end of the research, a prize awaits the participants where it all began: right in the presence of the great symbols invented by Giannone.
Sunday 12 May, at 5pm, the appointment is with “Love and homeland. Poetic and musical improvisations” with unpublished “poetic paintings”, born from the consonance between poetry, painting and music, which evoke stories of passion and freedom.
The poet and university professor Alberto Bertoni and the musicians Sandro Volta and Emma D’Angelo will accompany visitors on an unprecedented journey through the recently rearranged rooms, which display the collections of the Marquis Matteo Campori and the accountant Carlo Sernicoli until reaching the exhibition “Enigma prohibited”. The protagonists and subjects of the paintings will enter into dialogue with poetic and literary passages taken from Torquato Tasso, Shakespeare, Eugenio Montale, Walter Benjamin, Goethe, Vittorio Sereni and Alberto Bertoni. The itinerary will culminate in the exhibition “Forbidden Enigma” with readings taken from the “Ricordanze” by Giacomo Leopardi and from the erotic octaves written by Pietro Celestino Giannone. Images and words will intertwine with the musical notes born from the improvisation of the guitarist Sandro Volta and the violinist Emma d’Angelo.
Participation is free (although booking is recommended: 059 203 3125; [email protected]) and the meeting point is in the Museum. The initiative is part of the program “Of poetry and freedom”, linked to the exhibition “Forbidden Enigma. Secrets and eroticism in the encrypted poem by Pietro Giannone” currently at the Civic Museum.
The “Forbidden Enigma” exhibition, on display until August 25th in the renovated rooms of the Civic Museum, is built around a short encrypted manuscript belonging to the Civic Museum’s Risorgimento collection and signed by the patriot Pietro Giannone, with numbers and strange symbols forming a incomprehensible text that remained inviolate for almost 150 years, despite repeated attempts to decipher it, fueling the idea that the code hid historical information relating to the Carboneria. And instead, when in 2014, Paolo Bonavoglia, mathematics teacher, in collaboration with Consolato Pellegrino found the key to the code, the manuscript revealed not secret stories of the Carboneria but a highly licentious erotic-libertine poem. The exhibition itinerary invites you to enter the mysterious world of cryptography and secret writing and tells the story of Pietro Giannone and the cryptographic adventure that led to deciphering the code. The exhibition offers, for the first time, two parallel levels of use: one for adults and one for children, in an interactive dimension which, with videos and multimedia stations, invites visitors to get involved by experimenting with coded language after understanding its secrets. The public over 16 will be able to access a secret room to read the verses of the poem, while the little ones will have a room reserved for them, “forbidden to adults”.
