Il management della storia: quale prodotto per quale mercato

Purpose of the paper: This paper aims to demonstrate how a type of cultural heritage such an archival collection can be turned into a non-conventional museum, which would not be based upon the exhibition of objects, but on the transmission of knowledge using the mechanism of storytelling.

Methodology: The paper analyses the case of the Historical Archives of the Banco di Napoli, which is part of the Foundation of the same name, and in particular on its museum project called ilCartastorie.

Results: The paper allows a model to be made from this experience, with a transferable approach to cultural heritage contexts involving printed material (essentially archives and libraries), by delineating a conceptual and operative framework for the creation of historical museums which primarily use the technique of storytelling.

Research limitations: In light of the fact that this is the presentation of a single case study, the limitation of the research lies in the specificity of the subject matter of the research and its condition as a private holder of cultural heritage which is of interest to the public; from this point of view, the principles of transferability may clash with the regulatory and procedural limits found in the public sector, which holds a large part of the cultural heritage found in archives and libraries.

Practical implications: From an operational point of view, this paper provides the essential coordinates to be applied to the promotional model, while adapting them to other contexts.

Originality of the paper: Traditional archives very rarely and in completely different ways move towards an integrated project of promotion and, when applied, it is usually based on the mechanism of “exposition” of the archival documents and not on the narrative process of the content of those same documents. The originality of this paper lies essentially in the specificity of the subject matter of the research: an archival collection which uses storytelling for the transmission of knowledge.

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