Pietro Canonica, my personal sculptor

In 2014 the municipality of Rome decided to allow free access to eight “small museums”, as they were called, to face the lack of visitors recorded in the last years, without taking into account economic investment for communication and promotion. The programme aims to make the Pietro Canonica Museum, one of the eight small museums, enjoyable for families by creating a cultural mediation tool that is both a family guide and a role playing game. To cope with the lack of economic resources, this tool is only available online for the visitors’ digital devices. The house-museum Pietro Canonica, located in the Villa Borghese gardens, exposes a collection of statues displayed by subject matter and includes in the artist’s home and studio. According to the programme, families visiting the museum are involved in a role-playing game in which young members pretend to be clients visiting the artist’s studio. Adults play the role of experts who assist the visitors in the observation and interpretation of the works of art and cooperate as cultural mediators. The programme aims at creating a low budget cultural mediation tool, easily adaptable to the current exhibition. A tool that gives the opportunity to discover the life and art of a sculptor who lived between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.