Bologna's Civic Museums become dog-friendly: dog-sitting and thematic routes dedicated to dogs

Thanks to the agreement between Istituzione Bologna Musei and Bauadvisor, a communications and services portal dedicated to the world of dogs and their owners designed to live together 24 hours a day every day, from today Bologna’s Civic Museums become pet-friendly.

The Dogs & Museum dog-sitting service, conceived by Bauadvisor, will allow dog owners to fully enjoy their visit to the museums by entrusting a professional dog sitter with the care of their four-legged friends for the entire duration of their stay at the museum venue. The service is available by reservation through the portal www.bauadvisor.it and the Bauadvisor app. Once a reservation is made, experts from the Bauadvisor team will greet the visitor in front of the indicated museum entrance and temporarily pick up the dog and then walk and entertain it in the green areas near the museum.

Istituzione Bologna Musei is the first Italian museum system to adopt this dog-friendly service. The initiative responds to the widespread need among dog owners to promote accessibility of the museum’s heritage to a wider audience.

However, the agreement between Istituzione Musei Bologna and Bauadvisor does not stop at dog-sitting: in fact, the first thematic itineraries have been developed, proposing a new key to discovering the civic museum heritage through the depiction of this animal, which is highly represented in the history of art. Designed to illustrate the history of the relationship between man and his most faithful friend over the centuries, from antiquity to modern times, these new visitor itineraries offer a rich and articulate narrative, including archaeology, painting and sculpture, along the collections of nine museums: Museo Civico Archeologico, Collezioni Comunali d’Arte, Museo Civico Medievale, Museo Davia Bargellini, Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica, Museo civico del Risorgimento, Museo del Patrimonio Industriale, MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna and Museo Morandi.

The works selected for the dog-friendly visiting routes will be easily recognizable thanks to the presence of various communication supports marked with a dog icon conceived and designed by Maria Elena Canè, restorer at the Civic Archaeological Museum.

Below are the new dog-friendly visit routes in the Istituzione Bologna Musei venues.

Civic Archaeological Museum | via dell’Archiginnasio 2
An articulated itinerary dedicated to the dog entitled An Ancient Friendship has been created. Following the thread of the canine presence depicted on archaeological finds, it is possible to venture through the collections and enjoy a visit entirely focused on the role our four-legged friends had in Greek, Etruscan and Roman societies. All with the guidance of the museum-produced booklet An Ancient Friendship, available free of charge to all visitors who request it at the ticket office. Through a twenty-point itinerary, starting from the Lapidarium and reaching the Greek and Roman collections, the gipsoteca and especially the large tenth hall where the history of Etruscan Bologna unfolds, visitors will encounter figured terracottas, sculptures, bronze vessels and tools, coins, medals and Attic and Magna Graecia ceramics. A protagonist of mythological events alongside gods and heroes, the dog in different cultures also turns out to be associated with the afterlife, taking on the function of guardian of the otherworldly realm and guide for the souls of the deceased.

Municipal Art Collections | Palazzo d’Accursio, Piazza Maggiore 6
From ancient times it has been customary to associate the dog with the idea of loyalty. For this reason, small dogs, especially the Papillon (or Continental Dwarf Spaniel), are often noted in portraits of married women made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was thus certified that the same qualities of the dog could also be found in the mistress. Dogs are often featured in ancient myths. Paintings in the museum include a border collie at the feet of the young shepherd Paris, while Diana, goddess of the hunt, is accompanied by a very elegant greyhound. The dog Tagus, on the other hand, actually existed: the terracotta sculpture depicting the Weimaraner (or Weimar Bracco), visible in the last room of the museum’s Rusconi Wing, is in fact a memorial that Marquis Tommaso de’ Buoi had made after the sudden and accidental death of his own animal, in order to celebrate its valor and loyalty. At the sight of his master returning from a long journey, Tagus could not contain his happiness and threw himself at him from a window on the second floor of his residence palace, being killed. For more than two centuries from that windowsill this statue with the portrait of the dog waiting to see his master again has stood.

Museo Civico Medievale | via Manzoni 4
In the 15th-century tile, an elegantly dressed young man pauses during the aristocratic pastime of hunting to give alms to a destitute old man; a hawk on his arm and two dogs reveal the engagement just interrupted. The relief seems to restore a scene of courtly life, but it conceals allegorical content of moral and religious value. Antiquity as paradigm, on the other hand, is the common thread linking some small bronzes in the collection of the Museo Civico Medievale. In fact, from ancient statuary seems to derive the bronze with the young hunter, Meleager or perhaps Adonis, which is inspired by the invention of the famous marble preserved at the Pio-Clementine Museum(Vatican Museums, a Roman copy from a Greek original of the fourth century B.C.): despite the “at rest” position, the master and his faithful hunting companion, side by side, create a dynamic effect in the fluid and studied juxtaposition of motions. More attentive to the datum of naturalism drawn from life is the crouching dog scratching. Reality in its less celebratory aspects suggests themes even for sculptors who specialize in the genre of animal figures, which in the world beyond the mountains prove far from readings filtered through the lens of myth and allegory.

Davia Bargellini Museum | Strada Maggiore 44
Ancient myth is a frequent source of inspiration in the choice of subjects in which the dog appears as a companion in adventures. Such is the case of the hunter Endymion, lost in his endless sleep, but faithfully watched over by his own dog, crouched at his feet and perhaps intimidated before the appearance of Diana, in the terracotta relief by Giuseppe Maria Mazza (ca. 1695). The same Arcadian reenactment provides the cue for Marcantonio Franceschini’s painting (1712), in which Adonis, killed by a wild boar during a hunting party, is accompanied by a slender hound, affectionately leaning his paws on his knees.
With Luigi Crespi’s paintings, the setting leads out of the myth and into real life: fully dressed, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, a new firearm that supplanted the ancient arrows, a hunter is festively greeted by his hound while proudly displaying his captured prey, a hare. It is a pug, on the other hand, that is the second protagonist of the “double portrait,” which restores the atmosphere of an Enlightenment Age drawing room: next to the “open and intelligent face” of the lady, the equally lively expression of her little dog completes the lively worldliness that must have animated the social occasions of the “civilization of conversation.”

International Museum and Library of Music | Strada Maggiore 34
The Baroque period placed great emphasis on the ability to imitate as faithfully as possible the phenomena of the world. And one of the favorite experiments was precisely the imitation in music of animal verses. Proof of this is provided by the Bolognese monk Adriano Banchieri in the frontispiece of the treatise La nobiltà dell’Asino di Attabalippa dal Peru, in which the pretentious companies and academies that regulated the activities of artists at the time are pilloried. In the two depictions by John Luke Confort and Marin Mersenne, the citaredo Apollo is typically surrounded by a circle of prey and predators portrayed side by side in peaceful coexistence as they are tamed by the instrument played by the god. The Libro primo d’intavolatura di lauto by the Venetian Johannes Hieronymus Kapsperger is open on a composition that features the image of a dog chasing a hare: this is the graphic representation of the piece of music that features the contrapuntal artifice called “hunting,” in which throughout the piece one voice (symbolized by the dog) “hunts” (i.e. chases) the other (the hare).

Museo civico del Risorgimento | Piazza Carducci 5
The collection of the Museo civico del Risorgimento features four works that present the figure of a dog within the different contexts of its relationship with the world of humans (The Adventure of the Hunt, The Pleasure of Companionship, The Loyalty of the Guard, and The Military World).

Museum of Industrial Heritage | via della Beverara 123
Beginning in the 13th century, there are records in Italy of a dog known as the Bolognese, which was particularly loved by the female nobility because of its pronounced qualities of affection and companionship. In the 16th century, great Italian families such as the De Medici, the Gonzaga, and the Este bred Bolognese dogs for their own family members but also for diplomatic purposes: the small dog became a calling card, a precious “product” to be given to courts throughout Europe on the occasion of treaties and marriage contracts. In fact, until the early 19th century, foreign travelers passing through Bologna on their Grand Tour pointed to the breeding of Bolognese pooches as an important export item, second only to the sale of silk veils and fabrics and mortadella.

MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna | via Don Minzoni 14
Visitors with dogs, before or after visiting MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, can take a walk in the Giardino del Cavaticcio at the back of the museum and observe together the work Scudo con fontana (1987/1993) by Mimmo Paladino. In the sculpture placed inside the large basin that recalls the Cavaticcio canal, a composed male figure with essential features adheres to a large disk provided with an animal head, most likely a canid, perhaps a wolf or a dog, from whose mouth gushes a gush of the water on which the sculpture seems to float.

Morandi Museum | via Don Minzoni 14
It was precisely near Casa Morandi that an episode involving Morandi and his dog took place, indicative of the artist’s personality. Carlo Zucchini, guarantor of the Morandi donation to the City of Bologna, recounts: “Morandi used to call everyone ’lei,’ even his dog. I heard him say, under the Fondazza porticos, ’You be careful not to go between the legs of passers-by.’”

Image: Luigi Crespi, Portrait of a Gentlewoman (c. 1755; oil on canvas; Bologna, Davia Bargellini Museum)

Bologna's Civic Museums become dog-friendly: dog-sitting and thematic routes dedicated to dogs

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