The museum is housed within the premises of the Palazzo del Podestà, in the historic center of Gualdo Tadino, a town located in the northeastern part of Umbria, near the border with Marche.
The museum’s headquarters was the ancient residence of the Podestà, of which today remains the mighty 13th-century Civic Tower topped with a Baroque lantern.
The museum was founded to recover the memory of the migratory experience and to tell through voices, sounds, images, documents, and objects the stories of a people who left en masse “for very distant lands” to offer the world youth, work, craft, and culture.
The Emigration Museum of Gualdo Tadino, dedicated to Pietro Conti, the first president of the Umbria Region, is the first in Italy completely devoted to this theme. It has a unique collection of documentary materials on Italian emigration abroad from the late 19th century until the 1960s.
The museum is also a research center focusing on Umbrian emigration. It functions as an educational lab and many schools have joined this project. Publications on the subject are also produced.
The documentation center also includes a video library that collects films, documents, and journalistic reports reorganized and cataloged. RAI has contributed to enriching this material by duplicating and donating everything related to this topic to the museum, as well as some foreign TV stations, with the aim of acquiring as much material as possible to establish a national audiovisual reference center. The library collects all books and volumes related to the migration phenomenon, with particular attention to Italian emigration abroad.
The museum itinerary is reverse: arrival, journey, and departure. The first section immediately takes the visitor into the life of emigrants abroad: community gathering, food, religion, occupation, with particular regard to the reconstruction of work in the iron and coal mines. The protagonist of the second section is the theme of the journey: rare and moving images of transoceanic crossings, monitors emerging from old cardboard suitcases and ancient trunks, sound bells narrating precious testimonies of hard and perilous journeys aboard slow and overloaded ships. Finally, the third area is dedicated to departure and the reasons that pushed millions of Italians to try emigration to foreign lands: the difficulties of integration, the production of numerous documents to avoid rejection at the border, identity cards with fingerprints, passports, certificates of good health.
Information on the Regional Museum of Emigration “Pietro Conti”
Piazza del Soprammuro, 1
06023 Gualdo Tadino (Perugia)
0759142445
info@emigrazione.it
Source: MIBACT
