Syracuse's Archimedes Museum director: no green passes in museums, ready to close

After Fabrizio Masucci, director of the Sansevero Chapel Museum in Naples, another voice from the same quarters is speaking out against the green pass. It is that of Maria Gabriella Capizzi, director of the Archimedes and Leonardo Museum in Syracuse, a private institute opened in 2015 that displays a selection of about sixty reproductions of machines by Leonardo da Vinci (it is the most comprehensive exhibition of its kind in southern Italy) and Archimedes.

The museum had already intervened on the green pass issue with a Facebook post, unsigned (thus an expression of the entire facility), last August 5: “Who gets to decide which individuals can benefit from a service, not the modalities but the eligibility itself?” the Ortigia-based institute wondered. “In this specific case, of a service unanimously considered fundamental to the development of the identity of individuals and peoples. At this point, even the field of culture, inspired by the universal principles of sharing and horizontality of its goods, becomes, in one sense or another, the site of a ’hierarchy,’ between the admitted and the non-admitted.”

Capizzi has now returned to the subject: “This space in the heart of Ortigia, a crossroads of peoples and history,” he told Ansa, “is inspired by the universal principles of every place of culture, and of Archimedes and Leonardo in particular, namely the sharing and horizontality of one’s goods and knowledge, and it cannot be made, in one sense or another, a detector of hierarchies between the admitted and the non-admitted. If this is bound to happen I am ready even to close down.”

“Without going into the purpose the government intended,” adds the director of the Archimedes and Leonardo Museum, “I would like to remind everyone that museums are by their very vocation places of inclusion and that equal access to art and culture is a right of all. By the way, we have made significant investments in terms of security: sanitization, masks, one-way paths with restricted entrances, spacing that would then be totally unnecessary? In a place, moreover, where, alas, there is never the crowding of shopping malls and where people mostly stay in silence and in small groups to admire what the greats of the past have bequeathed to us. The Archimedes and Leonardo Museum is fresh off a weekend, at a vacation time to boot, that was disheartening to say the least. With numbers almost cut in half compared to previous weekends.”

At the moment, the museum is still open (with the exception of the August holiday weekend: in fact, museum activities will resume on the 16th). We will see in the coming days whether Maria Gabriella Capizzi’s stance will lead to concrete acts.

In the photo: Maria Gabriella Capizzi

Syracuse's Archimedes Museum director: no green passes in museums, ready to close

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