Museums of Landscape. A Project for the Tuscia’s Archaeological Heritage

Abstract

In recent decades, numerous initiatives have seen the aims of Italian architects and archaeologists converge on the necessity to found the country’s future on the basis of a renewal of cultural heritage that represents it. “Patrimonio al futuro” (Volpe, 2015), “Il nuovo dell’Italia è nel passato” (Carandini, 2012), “Architettura e patrimonio: progettare in un paese antico” (Franciosini and Casadei, 2015) are just some of the most recent publications that testify to this orientation. The contribution presents a proposal, winner of the first prize in an idea’s competition, focused on the valorisation of the Tuscia territory, that is an internal landscape of middle Italy, in which the archaeology-landscape dualism is the main structuring character. In this framework, the idea of “Museums of landscape” was born: going beyond the canonical concept that identifies the museum as a monumental building closed in itself, to give rise to a sort of an “exploded museum” in the territory. It is an accessible network where the archaeological areas are conceived as open-air exhibition rooms spread throughout the territory, in which archaeology and landscape intertwine to form a unified narrative, both physical and virtual, able to host different events in the new inclusive archaeological “rooms”. Keywords: architectural design, archaeological heritage, architecture for archaeology, museums of landscape, cultural landscape.