'Museum of the Obvious'

The same day that we visited Federico's dairy we also organized an afternoon outing to Ozzano Taro, a hamlet a half-hour away, to see the Museo Ettore Guatelli. Our friend Dana had alerted me to its existence and we'd discussed going there last August, but the trip hadn't materialized. Now Dana was in the neighborhood and my brother and sister-in-law were happy to come along. (Just as important, they had a rental car and were willing to drive.) (And Dean took most of the photos accompanying this post, since his were so much better than mine.)

We met up with Dana at a nearby restaurant, ate a meal of torta fritta, salumi, gnocchi in Parmesan cream, pumpkin tortelli, and donkey with polenta. (Everything was good, but the donkey at last summer's festa was better.) Then we headed over to the museum. 

Ettore Guatelli was born in 1921. His parents were farmers; he became an elementary-school teacher and a member of the local literati while continuing to live in his family's capacious barn-cum-farmhouse. Sometime in the 1960s he began collecting tools, household items, toys, and other artifacts from his neighbors and in the surrounding countryside. As Italy's peasantry began to emerge from the desperate poverty of the preceding centuries, people were discarding their old, handmade, hard-used, oft-mended things in favor of new, machine-made substitutes, and Guatelli eagerly swept up everything they were getting rid of. He continued to collect for his museum until he died in 2000.

It seems undeniable that Guatelli had a form of hoarding disorder. Equally undeniable is that he channeled his compulsion into an overwhelming installation that's an artwork in its own right. As the members of his family moved away or died, he filled one room after another with his collection, carefully curated and beautifully arranged on every surface, including the ceilings.

Many of the things are handmade, so even spades, scoops, baskets, and wheels that are very similar are also, as Dana put it, "as individual as snowflakes."

Guatelli seemed particularly drawn to objects that had been repaired or repurposed, mute testimony to the scarcity and hardship that ruled rural Italians' lives.

A vast room at the top of the house is the biggest and most delirious installation, with pattern on pattern spreading across and over the space, a tsunami of textures and forms.

 

In the photo above, the huge accordion-like thing on the lower right side is a church organ's set of bellows, repurposed for a blacksmith's forge before ending up with Guatelli.

There were quite a few stuffed or otherwise preserved animals, including a collection of dried-out rats and mice from various barnyards, the skin of a performing bear alongside a poster advertising his tricks, and this indignant monkey holding a mirror, a backwoods memento mori.

Guatelli's painstaking arrangements were breathtaking, and so were the individual objects, all speaking of a history not so far from us in time yet extraordinarily distant. It took us more than two hours to go through the museum, helped along by our guide, Lino, who knew Guatelli while he lived and is now part of the foundation that keeps the museum going. We knew we weren't managing to examine everything we wanted to, but it was a warm day (the heat wave was starting to move in) and we were all suffering from a combination of overheating, overeating, and visual overload.

While most of the museum had a graphic and monochrome air, the final room on the tour was an explosion of color--Guatelli's collection of tins and cans, their labels still cacophonously bright.

Guatelli called his creation "a museum of the quotidian" and "a museum of the obvious"--that is, of things so everyday that no one notices them. "Anyone can make a museum of beautiful things," he wrote. "It's more difficult to create a beautiful museum with humble things like mine."

I peeked inside some of the cans. They were all full of more cans.

We asked Lino to take our picture as a memento of this wonderful place. Can you see how simultaneously exhilarated and exhausted we were by this whole experience?

Since our visit we've been telling anyone who will listen about the museum. I want everyone I know to go see it, but I'm not sure I want to go back myself. It's a little too overwhelming. In a while I'll probably be hungry to see it again, but for now remembering it is enough.