A multimedia tour through six rooms, guided by the voice of narrator Leo Gullotta, to immerse oneself in the life, works and imagination of the Nobel laureate from Agrigento. The Sicilian Region returns the Casa Museo Luigi Pirandello, in contrada Caos in Agrigento, to the public, upgraded and with a new exhibition layout.
TECHNOLOGY AND NARRATION BY LEO GULLOTTA
After the maintenance, adaptation and removal of architectural barriers, ordered by the Musumeci government to restore decorum and functionality to the building, which is a national monument, the birthplace of the Sicilian writer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934, now also offers a state-of-the-art immersive and multimedia itinerary among original texts, archival audiovisual materials and specially composed music. The narrative voice of maestro Leo Gullotta guides an emotional tour that winds its way through the different stations, with innovative technological solutions perfectly integrated into the ambience of the historic residence. An application for smartphones (available on iOS and Android operating systems) allows visitors to enjoy a variety of in-depth content, including text, audio and augmented reality, both inside and outside the museum. Finally, the visiting experience is completed with the ‘Virtual Tour’ with 360° images, created with Matterport technology and usable on the web from any device.
‘The house where Luigi Pirandello was born, declared a national monument in 1949 and purchased by the Region three years later,’ says the President of the Sicilian Region, Nello Musumeci ‘had never, in this very long period of time, received either the attention or the upgrading and modernisation work that time, and above all the calibre of the Maestro who was born here, required. A sad, bare place, forbidden to the disabled, certainly not suitable for housing the invaluable testimonies recounting the life and literary works of the Sicilian Nobel Prize winner. The cultural space that we are now handing back to the Sicilians, to the many tourists who come here from all over the world, to scholars and the scientific community is thus finally up to the standards of one of the most important writers and playwrights of Italian literature.’
The new layout was curated by TIM and ETT and integrates the rich artistic and documentary heritage already housed in the House Museum with multimedia and immersive experiences. The project was created to give new communicative potential to Pirandello’s work, without distorting the artefacts and memories preserved within the walls of the ancient villa. Specifically, TIM has made available cloud technologies and services to enrich the cultural experience of the visit and allow both ‘traditional’ and ‘virtual’ visitors to enjoy multimedia content, according to the augmented reality paradigm, that broadens their knowledge of the life and works of the great writer and poet.
‘Re-opening the house-museum where Luigi Pirandello was born in Agrigento on the anniversary of his death,’ emphasises the Regional Councillor for Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity, Alberto Samonà ‘is a way of honouring his memory, returning this unique place, enriched by a new layout that allows visitors to grasp the many aspects of this great Sicilian of ours. The reopening of the Casa di Pirandello is a celebration of Culture, not only because it takes place on a symbolic date, but also because, thanks to the use of technology and an important scientific kit, it allows us to immerse ourselves in the life and work of the Nobel Prize winner: we are inaugurating a house-museum that is accessible to all and equipped with the most modern European museum standards. Enhancing the value of our cultural heritage is the right route for true development of our land.’
THE SIX ROOMS
The museum tour unfolds in six rooms, each dedicated to a different theme, like stages in a journey. Room 1A (The Man and the Family) introduces the visit through painting, a passion of the Pirandello family, Room 1B (The Landscapes of the Soul and the Two-Faced Janus) to Pirandello’s places of the heart and dualisms, Room 2 (Theatre and Cinema) is dedicated to the author’s theatre and film productions and features an immersive projection that allows visitors to find themselves at the centre of the narrated representations; Room 3 (Life and Death) houses the Greek vase that preserved the writer’s ashes and offers a large video projection through which it is easy to identify with the main events in the author’s life, including the awarding of the Nobel Prize; in Room 4 (Room of Words) the visitor will “physically” enter Pirandello’s vocabulary; in Room 5 (Novels, novellas and poems) a reproduction of the writer’s writing desk invites the visitor to leaf through his notebooks and notes digitally; finally, Room 6 (The Masks) is dedicated to a theme dear to Pirandello’s work: the visitor is confronted with his own masks, through the virtual ones that come to life on the monitors on the wall.
THE MUSEUM AND LIBRARY
The villa where the Casa Museo Luigi Pirandello is located has belonged to the Ricci Gramitto family, the writer’s maternal ancestors, since 1817. The Pirandello family found refuge in this residence to escape the severe cholera epidemic that raged across Sicily in 1867. Damaged in 1944 by the explosion of the nearby American troops’ ammunition depot, it was declared a national monument in 1949. Three years later, the Sicilian Region acquired it and began work on restoring and refurbishing the house and the road connecting it to the maritime pine, the famous tree under which the playwright from Agrigento found inspiration for some of his most famous works. Since 1987, the Birthplace has formed a single institute with the Luigi Pirandello Library.
All contents were realised under the supervision and scientific coordination of Professor Sarah Zappulla Muscarà and lawyer Enzo Zappulla, among the leading Pirandello experts and scholars, under the supervision of the Agrigento Cultural Heritage Superintendency.
‘This important collaboration adds further value to TIM’s role as a driver of technological innovation and reference partner for companies and public administration in the country’s digitalisation process,’ comments Claudio Pellegrini, TIM’s Head of Sales Local Government, Health & Education. ‘The technological skills and cutting-edge infrastructures created by TIM represent an important tool for improving daily life and fostering the development of digital solutions at the service of cities and the territory.’
“The experience we went through during the multimedia refurbishment of the Luigi Pirandello House Museum,” emphasises ETT Managing Director Giovanni Verreschi, “was first and foremost dedicated to deepening the themes focused on by the writer who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Even technology had to undergo a process of adaptation, bending to the author’s thought, to express the reflective folds that made him ‘unique’. We are proud to have contributed, under the guidance of the Superintendency, to revive with ETT’s technological solutions the intangible heritage that is in many ways still hidden in the works of the writer”.