Puglia and its museums. A sentimental journey

The reality of museums in Apulia is so varied that it is difficult to say how many can be defined as such today. The ninety percent of museums in Apulia is made up of small archaeological collections, reconstructions of the processes of anthropization that have affected this strip of land that stretches out into the Mediterranean, exposed to disembarks, conquests, migrations, landings, shipwrecks, of which museums preserve an intangible echo; principals of identity adrift in a world that runs in the opposite direction from the urge to recover a relationship with the soul of places. In view of the fragmented nature of Apulian museum reality, what connotes a museum as such, whether large or small, rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, antique or contemporary, is the sentimental relationship it manages to establish with the community and the measure to which it is perceived as an agent of change of reality and how attuned it is to the dreams and hopes of the society in which it operates. The poets of sentimental dynamics understand this, and Franco Arminio is a poet intimately connected with the spirit of places and with the feeling of Southern countries and with what connects the South to the East. This is the reason why we asked him to undertake a very personal journey though Apulia and its museums, a sentimental itinerary capable of returning us to the sense of whole and at the same time leading us to the essence of things. A journey not as an expert but as a poet, precisely, with the capacity that poetic language has to become an instrument of investigation, as Ezra Pound reminds us. Writing about poetry is a way of thinking about one’s time, Antonio Prete taught us, and paraphrasing the poet from Salento, we can say that, like poetry, museums are a point of distance from which to look at our time.