The Modena Civic Museum, with the Graziosi Plaster Cast Gallery and the “Avia Pervia” immersive route, remains open to the public throughout the summer, for the first time without interruptions for the summer break. The new opening hours, in force from Tuesday 2 July to Saturday 31 August, are from Tuesday to Sunday, from 9am to 1pm.
As Mayor Massimo Mezzetti points out, remaining always open is “a choice that represents an important step to enhance our cultural heritage and offer citizens and tourists a unique opportunity. To discover and appreciate our beauties all year round, for the first time without summer breaks. The great growth in tourists coming to Modena also requires an adjustment of the offer of our Museums. Let’s continue on this path”.
In the rooms of the Museum, on the third floor of the renovated Palazzo dei Musei, with entrance from Largo Sant’Agostino, visitors will be able to admire the art and craft collections of musical and scientific instruments, weapons and fabrics that make up the museum itinerary and the exhibition “Prohibited Enigma. Secrets and eroticism in the encrypted poem of Pietro Giannone”, built around a short encrypted manuscript belonging to the Risorgimento collection of the Civic Museum and signed by the patriot Pietro Giannone, with numbers and strange symbols forming an incomprehensible text that remained untouched 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, a 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 the deciphering of the code. The installation offers, for the first time, two parallel levels of fruition: one for adults and one for children, in an interactive dimension that, with videos and multimedia stations, invites visitors to get involved by experimenting with the encrypted language after having understood its secrets. The over-16 public will be able to access a secret room to read the verses of the poem, while the little ones have a room all to themselves, “forbidden to adults”.
On the ground floor, again with entrance from Largo Sant’Agostino, the Graziosi Plaster Cast Gallery is also open and displays a rich collection of plastic, pictorial and graphic works by the Modena artist who lived between 1879 and 1942.
The Civic Museum and the Graziosi Plaster Cast Gallery are free and open to entry.
With entrance from Viale Vittorio Veneto 9, the new immersive path “Avia Pervia” will also remain open throughout the summer, taking up the city motto in its name: a space that leads on an emotional journey through the history of the city and the palace, through visions, encounters and stories. A place that is both real and virtual, inviting you to discover the precious collections preserved in the cultural institutes of the Palace and, at the same time, provides suggestions for visiting the city. The path develops in five stages that tell of the ancient bond between Modena and its canals, of the medieval origins and transformations of the palace, of the “submerged history” of the archaeological finds and, indeed, of the riches preserved in the cultural institutes that bring the complex to life: the Gallerie Estensi, the Civic Museum, the Poletti Library and the Municipal Historical Archive. Finally, it ends with the Via Emilia as it was in Roman times. The entrance ticket to “Avia Pervia” costs 5 euros (3 euros reduced).
