Aldo Grassini was blinded at the age of six by a war residue explosion. For a long time, his disability forced him to study art passively, theoretically, without having direct knowledge of the works. However, a trip to Oslo in 1977 changed everything. He found himself in Vigeland Park, surrounded by sculptures that he could touch, feel, perhaps even see through another sense. “From then on the frustrations also began,” he says, because his enthusiasm often clashed with museums, where the imperative “not to touch” reigned. “If a blind person goes to a museum and doesn't touch anything, it's useless for him to go,” he says. In 1985, after suffering another disappointment in a German museum, his wife, Daniela Bottegoni, also blind, had an idea: to reproduce great art classics that could be played. She was the embryo of what eight years later, in 1993, would become the Omero Museum of Ancona, in the Marche region.
Today, Grassini is 83 years old and presides over the first example of a state tactile museum, dedicated to Homer, the considered author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, who, according to tradition, was blind. In its recently completed 30 years of history, the Omero Museum has grown to become a point of reference in the cultural life not only of the capital of the Marche region. From the first 19 plaster copies housed in a local school classroom, the collection has grown to exceed 200 views of classical masterpieces, architectural models and original contemporary sculptures accompanied by educational panels and legends in Braille inside the Mole Vanvitellianaa huge pentagonal building on the water of the Adriatic, once used as a defensive bastion and lazaretto, a few steps from the port.
“It is educational, it allows people with visual disabilities to directly experience reality. For them it is not enough to listen, it is as if we were studying art history without photographs. Here they can really understand why they see with their hands,” says Monica Bernacchia, head of communication at the museum. The visually impaired, however, only represent 2% of annual visits, in part because the museum was conceived from the beginning as an experience accessible to all types of audiences. “I thought that touch was a substitute for sight for the blind and a new experience for the sighted. Then, as I moved forward, my conception changed: in reality, touch is something different,” Grassini reflects.
The president, however, prefers to use another term: “caress,” that is, “touch with love,” which implies an emotional content and overcomes cultural reluctance related to touch. “We are against prohibiting touching, but sometimes when we say tap There is a resistance, because it is considered taboo,” he explains to a group of students, “so, when we say stroke, It is touched with love. We love with our eyes and with our hands. The things we love we want to caress.” In this way, on the first floor of the Mole you can caress and see plaster or resin copies of the Nike of Samothrace, the Capitoline Wolf, the Venus de Milo or models of the Parthenon, the Cathedral of Saint Peter in Rome and the Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa. The brightest room is dedicated to Renaissancewith a copy of the Piety by Michelangelo in resin and marble dust, made in collaboration with the Cinecittà studios in Rome, and a life-size Moses. In these cases, the top of the sculptures is reached through very stable mobile platforms.
There is also a gallery of the mimicry of the human facewhere a series of faces express different emotions, such as the moan of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Ávila, the setback of Michelangelo's portrait or the suffering of Laocoön. Refering to paintHowever, there are some copies in bas-relief, among them one that corresponds to a section of the Guernica by Picasso. This area is the prerogative of another tactile museum, the Anteros of Bologna.
The multisensory
On the second floor of the Mole there is a sculpture by Sergio Zanni titled Pittore sconosciuto (Painter unknown), dating from 2002. When touching it, one has the sensation that the work grows in size as the hands slide up and down. You can see the outline of a small head surrounded by a tiny hat, a larger back, on which a backpack rests, until you reach the legs, gigantic, one in front of the other. The hollow sound and freshness of the surface suggest that the material used is bronze; Then, once the blindfold is removed, sight helps to understand how close the perception left by the other senses is to reality. At that moment, Bernacchia explains that the man, the unknown painter, directs his gaze toward the horizon, while he leaves behind him a palace, an emblematic symbol of the city.
The Omero Museum offers visionaries a blindfolded visit to stimulate their perception of the works through other senses, although one of its first mottos was “It is not forbidden to touch, but neither is it forbidden to look.” In addition to Sergio Zanni, the second floor houses other greats contemporary authors such as Giorgio de Chirico, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Marino Marini, with original works such as the riciclicata italy (Recycled Italy) by Michelangelo Pistoletto, which the artist reproduced by covering it with a net that recalls the port character of Ancona, after having presented it at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
These sculptures help to further stimulate the museum's new approach, that of multisensory, which for Grassini is the main tool when it comes to further increasing accessibility. On the ground floor, this concept takes on another dimension thanks to a collection, the only paid one, made up of 32 design symbols that have become part of everyday life, some award winners Compasso d'Oro. In this case, visitors become protagonists to a greater extent because they can manipulate the objects, for example, by typing the letters on the Valentine typewriter by Ettore Sottsass, manufactured by Olivetti, or by turning the accelerator knob of the Vespa designed by Corradino D'Ascanio. Throughout the journey, space has been created Fuori tutti (Everyone out), a small room where miniatures of the exhibits are placed, also designed for people with neurodiversity.
An international model
“When we were born, 30 years ago, we were a voice crying in the desert. When a visitor arrived, it was a party. I once spent a day inside the museum and no one came. I enjoyed all my sculptures alone,” says Grassini. The president of the Omero Museum He has dedicated his entire life to the integration of the blind into society and his professional career demonstrates it. For 37 years he taught History and Philosophy in institutes, but he was also a municipal councilor for three terms and held positions in the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired. In Ancona he is also known as a great fan of the local team, having subscribed to all home games for 67 years. Every year he travels to attend international conferences dedicated to one of his great passions, Esperanto, the language invented by the Polish ophthalmologist Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof to facilitate dialogue between peoples, demonstrating that blindness is not an obstacle to curiosity and learning. desire to discover the world.
When he was a student, Grassini had the help of some classmates willing to read school texts to him, while he wrote everything in Braille. The definitive inclusion of children with visual disabilities in the school system did not occur until ten years after their graduation, with a law of 1976. Today, the situation has changed: more attention is paid to the integration of people with disabilities and This is demonstrated by the funds allocated by governments to the accessibility of cultural venues, such as those of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan Italian, which amounts to 300 million euros. Every day, the Omero Museum receives requests for collaboration or advice from museum institutions that want to open up to tactile tours to attract new visitors and funding. There are so many that it is difficult to take them all into account.
Grassini's first advice to museums is always the same: “Let people touch.” But at that moment, he says, “the problem arises because they say that the works must be protected.” In the Omero Museum no work has been damaged by contact with hands. The earthquake of 2022 took care of this, breaking the wing of the copy of the Nike of Samothrace. At the same time, Grassini is aware that not everything can be treated in the same way, so he has other solutions in mind, such as copies, contact with latex gloves or opening to touch exclusively for the blind. “I do not accept the [condicionante] Yes, when they tell me to see if it is possible to make this or that thing accessible. It has to be accessible,” he says. Another key point is the integration of tactile tours in the permanent collections of museums, to avoid what he calls “ghettoization.”
The Omero model has long been considered an international benchmark, as demonstrated the collaborations with the Louvre, the Colosseum archaeological park or the Cairo Archaeological Museum to break down physical, cognitive and sensory barriers. The projects also include exchanges of good practices, as in the case of the European initiative Invisible, aimed at creating methods and tools to make the teaching of arts and architecture accessible to students with visual disabilities. Soon, the Omero Museum will renew its exhibition precisely in this sense: “It will be thematic, non-chronological and more scientific, about the sense of touch and its specificities,” says Bernacchia. A commitment that for Grassini only has one objective: “My dream is that one day the Omero museum will no longer be necessary because it will mean that we will finally have broken this wall.”
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