Bologna Music Museum opens to the web: a new 360° immersive virtual tour

The International Museum and Library of Music in Bologna, a UNESCO Creative City of Music, opens its exhibition halls to the web and to all those who, for a variety of reasons, wish to get closer to the history of European music through about one hundred portraits of illustrious personalities, more than eighty ancient musical instruments, and a wide selection of historical documents of relevant value: treatises, volumes, opera librettos, letters, manuscripts, and autograph scores.

Thanks to the new immersive virtual tour VN 360°, conceived and created by the Italian-Japanese communication studio Veronesi Namioka, by accessing the site www.museibologna.it/musica it will be possible to take a panoramic virtual tour along the entire exhibition itinerary, which has been located on the second floor of the 16th-century Palazzo Sanguinetti since 2004.

Starting from the reception space used as a ticket office and bookshop, the virtual tour concludes with a glimpse of the second inner courtyard, known for the beautiful fresco landscape created on the back wall by Luigi Busatti in the 19th century and the square flowerbed at whose corners lush banana plants stand out.

Already the promoter of several digitization projects involving part of the bibliographic heritage preserved in the adjacent library, among the most prestigious collections of musical resources existing in the world with more than 100.000 units, including printed music repertories from the 16th to the 18th century, incunabula, manuscripts, opera librettos, as well as Father Giambattista Martini’s collection of autographs and letters, the Museum of Music is the first among Bologna’s civic museums to be accessible with this type of multimedia narrative.

With this new immersive virtual experience that restores a 360-degree view of the visit itinerary, the museum renews its vocation as a lively, multifunctional and interactive place, frequented by insiders and enthusiasts, but also by tourists, adults, and children, united by music in all its forms and expressions.

With the awareness that the design of content must increasingly orient itself toward the centrality of users and their different needs and interests, the Bologna Musei Institution intends to promote more integrated service models that, without claiming to be a completely equivalent replacement, place alongside the experience of physical visits to museum spaces the wealth of potential that digitization offers as a means of culture, education, entertainment, and access to its permanent collections beyond the strictly exhibition boundaries. A new form of storytelling to broaden the range of heritage information and make the public more aware and eager to approach.

The virtual tour is the result of the fusion of cultural-artistic expertise and state-of-the-art digital technologies, which make it possible to integrate the exhibition offerings of the physical museum with emotional and mutimedial virtual experiences, in close synergy with the museum staff who have curated the information content, in Italian and English, on some of the most valuable holdings on public display and sound contributions.

Unique artifacts, such as the manuscript Quaerite primum regnum dei that a 14-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart presented for the entrance exam to the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna in 1770 or the chamber robe that belonged to Gioachino Rossini, will be made known: thanks to the VN 360° route, clicking on a historical instrument will allow you to listen to its music or visit spaces normally inaccessible during the physical visit, such as the lantern that illuminates the illusionary arches of the scenographic staircase or the architectural details of the rooms and ceilings frescoed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries at the hands of Vincenzo Martinelli, Pelagio Pelagi, Serafino Barozzi, and Antonio Basoli, among the highest examples of the Napoleonic and neoclassical period in Bologna.

To access the VN 360° virtual tour, visit www.museibologna.it/musica

Bologna Music Museum opens to the web: a new 360° immersive virtual tour

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