Oikos: an exhibition in Reggio Calabria on how people lived in Magna Graecia

It is scheduled from August 10 to November 18, 2018, at the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria, the exhibition Oikos. The House in Magna Graecia and Sicily. The theme of the exhibition is the home and the way of living in Magna Graecia: an itinerary that makes use of more than one hundred artifacts from the Museum’s collection and other important public collections, such as those of the National Archaeological Museums of Naples and Taranto, the Regional Archaeological Museum “Paolo Orsi” of Syracuse, the Archaeological Parks of Paestum and the Phlegraean Fields, and the Archaeological Museum of Ancient Kaulon.

The exhibition is curated by Carmelo Malacrino, director of the Reggio Emilia museum, and archaeologist Maurizio Cannatà. “It will be a fascinating journey through time traversing the Greek house,” Malacrino explains, “to get to know its distribution of spaces, its furnishings, its objects of common daily use, but also its protagonists, welcomed by the hosts, with the women facing the window wrapped in their himatia. The display was designed with the support of multimedia tools to concretely present what the way of life and living in Magna Graecia was like.” The underlying theme of the exhibition is the oikos, a term that for the Greeks designated “the house understood as the physical living space of its inhabitants and, at the same time, the family with its possessions. Through the exhibition choice of window display, educational panels, graphic and digital architectural reconstructions and 3-D videos describing moments of daily life, we wanted to recreate the forms of living in the ancient Greek world.”

“The house,” Cannatà explains, “is for the ancient Greeks the expression of the identity of the community of its inhabitants and evolves over time according to how society changes. In the Greek language there is no equivalent term to the Latin familia. There is only one term, oikos. And this means that with respect to blood ties, membership in the family group, the basic cell of society, prevails.” If over the centuries, in the ancient Greek world in Calabria and Sicily, the structural organization of the spaces of the house is modified, Cannatà further explains, the function of the rooms with respect to the roles within the family does not change: “the man, citizen, politician, athlete and warrior, lives in the andron the convivial moments, of external relations, in the symposium. The woman oversees domestic work and has in the gynoecium her undisputed realm.”

The exhibition can be visited during the opening hours of the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria: daily from Monday to Sunday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Full ticket 8 euros, reduced 5 euros (and further reductions on Wednesdays: 6 euros full and 4 euros reduced). For “Summer Nights at the MArRC,” until Sept. 8, 2018, Thursday and Saturday evenings are extended until 11 p.m., and from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. you can enter with a ticket of only 3 euros. For all info you can visit www.museoarcheologicoreggiocalabria.it.

Oikos: an exhibition in Reggio Calabria on how people lived in Magna Graecia

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