Inauguration of the Vincenzo Bellini Multimedia Museum

The Vincenzo Bellini Multimedia Museum is a project funded by the Pact for Catania.

The Vincenzo Bellini Multimedia Museum was created by the City of Catania in collaboration, through the signing of a special agreement, with the University of Catania (Department of Humanities) and the Institute of Science and Technology of Cognition of the CNR-Catania.

The project pursues the goal of enhancing the enormous cultural heritage found in Vincenzo Bellini's Birthplace, where objects of inestimable artistic value are kept,as part of the overall redevelopment of the Piazza San Francesco site that houses the Museum's headquarters .This is one of the priority strategic actions promoted by the Culture Directorate of the City of Catania for the general revitalization of the overall museum network in Catania, including through the adoption of communication strategies that exploit multimedia technologies.

Inparticular, the Vincenzo Bellini Virtual Museum of Music was set up, characterized by an innovative scenographic and multimedia set-up of the composer's artistic and biographical story, through the enjoyment of an unprecedented museum itinerary, based on the simultaneous use of texts-sounds-images in digital format, which accompanies the visitor in a complete narrative of Bellini's life, thanks to the presence of original scenographic frames and multimedia rooms dedicated to the projection of archive video images and the exhibition of objects, documents, letters and scores.

In addition, an extensive cataloging of the archival and museum heritage that can also be consulted through high-resolution photos has been prepared, as well as the digital creation of the letters of Vincenzo Bellini from the Museum kept at the Museum.

Taking advantage of the pervasive impact of digital technologies, the Vincenzo Bellini Multimedia Museum offers an innovative and immersive enjoyment of the documents, stimulating the emotional participation of visitors through multimedia and virtual media that tell the story of Bellini's life and works in an engaging and interactive way through appropriate museum signage , as well as the provision of an Italian/English system for accessing audio/video content, in accordance with European guidelines for cultural institutions and current Icom recommendations on the subject, and in accordance with the Open-Data guidelines adopted to ensure the free use of the datasets available on the reference website: www.museovincenzobellini.it, developed by Ieeng Solution.

The sets were created by Civita-Mostre e Musei, the multimedia displays by TechnoLab Works, and the digital content by Wonderlab.

We would like to thank the Scientific Responsible for the design and organization of the musicological contents of the exhibit Prof.ssa Maria Rosa De Luca (Unict) and the Scientific Responsible for the design exhibit, knowledge organization and digital edition letters Dr. Rosario Falcone (CNR Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies), as well as Prof. Francesco Antinucci (CNR Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies) in relation to the design of the multimedia museum exhibit, together with the many collaborators, scientific advisors and experts involved, for the success of the project.