The new section of the Neapolitan museum will open to the public in the autumn of 2022: in dialogue 100 ancient artifacts, 3D animations and modern reconstructions of machinery from the Florentine institution

Under the direction of Paolo Giulierini, in recent years the National Archaeological Museum of Naples he distinguished himself for having embarked on an enhancement program that has led the Neapolitan institution to be a museum more and more up to European standards. Thus, after the reopening of the exhibition itinerary on the history of Magna Graecia in southern Italy, now the MANN is equipped with a new section thanks to the collaboration agreement for research and enhancement of the scientific culture of the ancient world between the Florentine Galileo Museum and the Neapolitan museum, which foresees the setting up of the new Roman Technological Section.

MANN OF NAPLES. THE SET-UP OF THE ROMAN TECHNOLOGICAL SECTION

“In the collective imagination, antiquity is an era of extraordinary artistic and architectural, literary and philosophical flowering”, He comments Giovanni Di Pasquale, Historian of Ancient Science at the Galileo Museum and co-curator of the scientific project together with Laura Forte, Archaeological Officer of the MANN. “The presumed marginalization of scientific knowledge, the inability to relate science and technology and the wide availability of slaves constituted the pillars of the very resistant thesis of the ‘technological stagnation’ of the ancient world. The setting up of the Roman Technological Section, the result of the collaboration between the MANN and the Galileo Museum, allows us to refute this hypothesis. A time when everything was invented from nothing, antiquity saw the presence of characters capable of building and using tools and machines to carry out impossible challenges. The archaeological documentation from Campania shows that oil and wine presses, cranes, water wheels, millstones, tools and technical equipment used successfully as early as the first century AD“.

THE EXHIBITION ROUTE OF THE ROMAN TECHNOLOGICAL SECTION

The exhibition itinerary of the Roman Technological Section will be articulated on different levels of communication: the archaeological finds from the Roman age – for the most part from the Vesuvian area and selected from the MANN deposits (frescoes, sundials, measuring and precision instruments) – will dialogue with the reconstructions of the main ancient machinery made by Opera Laboratories designed by the Museo Galileo. Projected onto large screens next to each machine, the 3D animations will tell the principles that govern the operation of machines and devices and the reasons why those technologies will be introduced.

THE NEW SECTION OPENS IN AUTUMN 2022

The new section will open to the public in the autumn of 2022 and will be housed in the so-called New Arm of the Institute, a sector of approximately 4,400 square meters of covered area on four floors, which houses a restaurant, a cafeteria, a huge auditorium: here, in the A path will be set up which, through about 100 modern finds and reconstructions of ancient machinery, will reveal how strategy and design will have allowed the citizens of the Vesuvian area to face great challenges. Noteworthy is the strong didactic approach of the Section, which will present in-depth studies intended not only for experts, but also for young people and schools.

THE COMMENT OF THE MANN DIRECTOR

“As is well known, very little of the achievements of the art of the ancient world would have been possible without a correct mastery of technologies, just think of the process of building a temple, from the quarrying of the stones to the raising of the columns.”, Declares the Director of the MANN, Paolo Giulierini. “The extraordinary discoveries of Pompeii have accelerated more and more the process of reunification between art museums and technology museums, because (unique case together with the Egyptian world) they have returned all the objects of everyday life that in the past had been kept aside, in dark deposits. A false idea of ​​ancient society often followed. In reality, already Amedeo Maiuri around the thirties of the twentieth century had the happy intuition of life in a Technological Section in the New Arm of the Museum, its distribution, dedicated to sciences and applied disciplines, from hydraulics to agriculture, to astronomy . Today the MANN, aware that ancient society cannot be told without re-establishing this union, has started the project to rearrange what was once the Technological Section, relying on the collaboration with the Galileo Museum, already started since the time of the exhibition ‘Homo Faber ‘(1999), dedicated to scientific knowledge in the Vesuvian area“.

– Claudia Giraud

MANN – Archaeological Museum of Naples, Piazza Museo, 19 80135 Naples NA
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www.museoarcheologiconapoli.it