Istituto degli Innocenti for Inclusion: Thematic Museum Network Musei di tutti (Museums for All) is Renewed

The thematic museum network “Museums for all” is renewed and strengthened. The network aims at ensuring accessibility to museums by promoting social inclusion, the enjoyment of cultural heritage and the active participation of citizens in activities. The network was established thanks to the collaboration between the Museum of the Istituto degli Innocenti, the Fiesole Archaeological Museum, the Bandini Museum, the Primo Conti Museum, Palazzo Vecchio Museum and Museo Novecento. The network, launched thanks to a partnership forged in 2008, has recently completed a three-year project to strengthen it. Member organisations have decided to renew and strengthen the cooperation agreement for a further three years (2024-2026) by putting in place a new pro-gramme of events and initiatives that expands on the activities already carried out and includes new projects. Among them, Venite, ve lo raccontiamo noi! (Come, we'll tell you about it), a project which will involve children in creating museum tours for their peers.

The thematic museum network: an opportunity to be seized

Over the past two decades, regional and national legislation has strongly urged and supported the establishment of museum networks. Their advantage is to optimise financial and professional resources and enable large-scale projects by pooling objectives that would be difficult for individual museums to achieve. In recent years, the network has participated in regional calls for tenders relating to the Integrated Plan for Culture, submitting projects to launch integration and accessibility strategies to improve the popularisation and promotion of the museums under their jurisdiction, and has been awarded regional funding for museums on an annual basis. This activity has also been instrumental in accrediting the Museo degli Innocenti as a museum of regional importance and is now linked to the “improvement objectives” of the national museum accreditation system.

The activities of the first three years of the “Museums for All” programme

With the new agreement, undersigned by the organisations concerned, the network reaffirms the two pillars on which its activities already rest: online and on-site. Over the past three years two main projects have been carried out: Memorie Sonore (Sound Memories) and AMIR - Welcoming, Museums, Inclusion and Relationship. The first project, launched in 2020, is aimed at creating innovative, targeted and high-quality digital content to strengthen the relationship with the in-person audience and reach an increasing number of remote visitors. Memorie Sonore consists of four audio-visual virtual tours in Italian and English, each one dedicated to a museum of the network (Archaeological Area of Fiesole, Primo Conti Museum, Palazzo Vecchio Museum, Museo degli Innocenti) with immersive audio contents which, by alternating narration and soundscapes, allow an innovative understanding of the cultural heritage. In addition to being accessible online, from January 2023 these routes are also available to visitors in the museums. The project has made it possible to involve sections of the public that might be excluded from museum activities, such as blind and partially sighted people. With the second project, AMIR, the museum network has launched a series of initiatives to foster the dialogue between museums and people from a mi-gratory background with the objectives of creating relationships, fostering the birth or growth of a sense of belonging to the main community and stimulating a process of recognition and appropriation of the cultural heritage.

Future activities

In line with the activities and projects implemented in the first three-year period, programming in the near future will be based on a rich schedule aiming at:

• Continuing with the Memorie Sonore project by creating a calendar of visits that are the outcome of a participatory and shared work between the museums involved and the Florence section of the Italian Union of Blind and Partially Sighted People.
• Carrying on improving the museum experience with the introduction of visual and tactile maps and promoting full accessibility to the network website.
• Continuing with the AMIR project by planning seven new thematic routes in the various museums of the network, organising thematic visits for everyone and others for schools, and organising a conference in collaboration with the University of Florence on the presence of people of African origin in Renaissance art.
• Putting in place the projectVenite, ve lo raccontiamo noi! (Come, we'll tell you about it) to involve children (6-10 years old) in the planning phase of visits dedicated to them in order to define an activity created by children for other children. The very young participants will not only be introduced to the Museums, but will also come into direct contact with the people who, in various capacities, make up its staff, so that they can feel part of the museum and actively collaborate in planning activities.