Polar mission: Monaco in pole position
At the Oceanographic Museum of the Rock, the new exhibition event challenges, without Manichaeism, the future of these territories of ice threatened by global warming.
An exhibition on the poles in Monaco: some will see it as a paradox. Alert on climate change from the top of this Rock symbol of excess, lulled by the sound of helicopters, punctuated by a number of construction sites per square kilometer to make Anne Hidalgo pale: a joke! Let them not go too quickly. This would be to forget that the principality counted within it one of the first polar explorers: the sovereign Albert I – son of Charles III, creator of the Société des Bains de Mer and at the origin of the stroke of genius which transformed Monaco into capital of games… It goes to show that Monegasque ambivalence is not new!
Between 1889 and 1907, the “ learned prince » conducts four expedition campaigns in Svalbard, in the north of Norway, on its laboratory ship, the Princess Alice II. Returning to dry land, in 1910 he founded the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, a sumptuous neo-baroque palace suspended from the cliff. For the centenary of the death of…