A reflection on the importance of the cognitive act, an activity, perhaps the only one, capable of transcending the human condition and carrying it toward other dimensions. An aspect, the cognitive act, far more significant and serious than is commonly assumed.

“What happens during a visit to a museum?” That’s how I opened the previous cover (which can be found in the site’s archives and is still available in the finest newsstands of London — the newsstand part isn’t true, but the information about the archives is, editor’s note). I then continued that cover with: “If they served no other purpose, museums would still possess, among their peculiarities, the ability to catalyze the emergence of new planes of projection which, when nourished by information, reasoning, states of mind, and interactions with various energetic expressions (for example, consider the work of a scholar), constitute the thresholds of genuine dimensions. What in art is identified as pathos becomes ‘epiphanized’ in forms and modalities that grow increasingly engaging, to the point of influencing habits, lifestyles, professions, research paths, and existential confessions.”

Let me now offer, with the aftertaste of panettone and lentils still lingering on the palate, a serious theological reflection, the conclusion of which I will share at the end of this editorial. The Christmas season (for those who frequent churches as if they were theatres, from the moment the priest removes the green chasuble to the moment he puts it on again, just to put it roughly) extends, liturgically speaking in the Catholic tradition, from Christmas Day to the Baptism of Jesus. It is a period marked by a series of epiphanies of the divine and, above all, by a continuous unfolding of expressions of “incarnation” within our species and within our immanence of an Entity which, whether one believes or not, belongs to another existential dimension, indeed defines it. Jesus is born, clothing himself in flesh; he is visited by various social groups; and at thirty he presents himself before his cousin, John the Baptist, to be baptized according to the latter’s rite, a variant of certain baptismal practices already present in Palestine at the time, closer to a rebirth, a shift of dimension, than to a purifying ritual. We must remember that before the twentieth century no naval victories of the Israeli fleet, nor epic feats of seamanship, entered the annals of history: that people regarded the sea, and any large body of water, as death itself, much like my paternal grandmother who, whenever she saw the sea, being a good daughter of the hills of Alessandria, would utter her macaronic verdict: “Mare, vidit et fugit!”

Let us remain with the seriousness of the theological reference. What does it mean to “become incarnate”? For a non‑human being, it means expressing one’s essence within a carbon‑based dimension, a dimension of flesh, precisely. The Holy Child in the grotto, according to tradition, illustrates this shift of dimension quite well. The adult Jesus, however, what does he intend to express through his baptism, which he insists on receiving from John, despite the latter being fully aware of the disparity between them? The event tells us that his process of incarnation is not limited to taking on a body, but seeks to expand into every aspect of human experience, only to emerge from it, after some years, through death and from death, thus returning to his original dimension (divine, for those like me who believe it). In between, according to the teachings of the Catholic Church, lies an unceasing series of crossings between dimensions: from the transformations of everyday immanence (the signs or miracles) to those, more significant, of the social, cultural, psychological, and anthropological perspective.

The issue of Christianity can therefore be summarized as follows: if you wish to understand anything, dear Homo sapiens, geolocated and culturally defined in Roman‑occupied Palestine, and shed light on who you are and what this painful and seemingly useless life of yours might be, you must be willing to shift the dimensions that shape your physical, cognitive, and relational immanence. Pilate, the unfortunate prefect then stationed in Palestine who, as some may recall, was tasked with judging Jesus, posed in this regard the most intelligent question of the entire drama of the Incarnation: “What is truth?” (John 18:38). In other words: what is this dimension of ours, and what purpose does it serve? To me, it sounds a bit like an American general having a sudden critical reflux about the concept of democracy, specifically about the way it is exported, a moment of profound lucidity promptly brought back into line, never again to interact with the office of the Roman official.

Let us now return to museums. The Christmas season has only just passed. We still carry with us the taste of slow breakfasts, and for the luckier ones, of hotel rooms; the familiar gestures that repeat themselves like small rituals. We return, perhaps, to museums with a body that is never neutral. We are still saturated with sensations, with scents, with recent memories. The moment we cross the threshold, something shifts: our everyday plane, the one I described in the previous cover as a surface of re‑imagined memories, is traversed by other planes, other possibilities, other dimensions.

It is in this state of suspension that a simple yet dizzying question returns to me: why do we enter a museum. What is changing within us in the presence of this cultural offering which, year after year, becomes increasingly “glamorous,” sparkling like the billboards of an American musical, supported by ever‑growing and loudly proclaimed figures announcing record attendance with fervent competitive enthusiasm. Are we becoming more cultured, or less cultured, that is, more aware or less aware of the reasons for our existence? Beyond the “how,” are we resolving any of the “why,” or is a life not too dissimilar from that of an amoeba sufficient for us, only a little more “restless” (with all due respect to such creatures, who may well be aware of the “whole” and must even endure us, the last species still in the dark about that “whole”)?

And yet, in museums, something endures. Something calls to us. Something reminds us that we are still multiversal psychosomatic unities, as I wrote in the previous cover: nodes of resonance between planes, possibilities, memories, and futures.

Perhaps culture has never been a collection of notions, but a threshold. A doorway into other modes of being. An exercise in incarnation. The initial question, perhaps, finds a different answer: we become more cultured every time we allow ourselves to be crossed; we become less cultured every time we remain impermeable. Think of that “What is truth,” of the painful dialogue between Pilate and Jesus, to stay with our opening thread. After posing that question (banal, perhaps, yet eloquent for a rough military man who, in Rome, had just lost his political protection and now had to navigate a “Roman/USA‑pacified” world between Jewish revolutionaries and the shrewd priestly castes of Israel then and now), the bureaucrat dissolves, like tears in the rain, like the most famous replicant in the history of science‑fiction literature, intelligence and existential dignity into the cruel logic of raison d’état and personal convenience.

Culture is not a possession: it is a metamorphosis. Every museum, every artwork, every gesture of attention is an invitation to die a little, so as to be reborn wider, more sensitive, more aware.

Perhaps being cultured simply means this: accepting that we are no longer the same after having perceived, and accepting it seriously, mind you.

There is a fever running through contemporary museums: the race toward multimedia. Screens, immersive projections, enveloping audio. A proliferation of technologies that promise “total” experiences, yet too often remain confined within the same sensory cage: sight and hearing. It is a multimedia approach that expands the eye, amplifies the ear, but leaves the rest of the body untouched. And yet the museum, by its very nature, is neither a cinema nor a planetarium. A museum is a sensory environment, a perceptual ecosystem that can, and must, involve the visitor’s entire psychosomatic unity.

Museum sensoriality is not a special effect: it is a grammar. It is the way in which space, light, surfaces, temperatures, silences, scents, postures, and the rhythms of the path construct an embodied experience. It is what allows the visitor to cease being merely an observer and become a sensing body, a presence in transformation.

Today more than ever, while museums chase yet another screen, it becomes urgent to remember that perception and cognitive activity are not a two‑dimensional act. Perception is a complex field, an interweaving of senses that converse, overlap, contradict one another, and amplify each other. A museum that speaks only to two senses is a museum that relinquishes its deepest power: that of activating the visitor as a multisensory being, as a node of resonance between worlds, memories, emotions, and possibilities.

Museum sensoriality is also a political act. It means creating spaces that are more inclusive for those who perceive the world in different ways: neurodivergence, hypersensitivity, hypo‑sensory processing, cognitive difficulties. It means recognizing that not everyone reads in the same way, listens in the same way, walks in the same way. A museum that adapts to bodies, instead of asking bodies to adapt, is a more just museum.

We must restore to the museum its original nature: a place of passage, of resonance, of transformation, of epiphanies. A place where the visitor does not merely “look,” but allows themselves to be touched, to be altered, to be surprised by that subtle epiphany that arises when the perceived and the perceiver meet and transform one another.

Museum sensoriality is the threshold through which the museum returns to being what it has always been: a laboratory of awareness, a perceptual landscape, a doorway into other modes of being.

Perhaps it is precisely there, in that subtle vibration between what we see and what we feel, between what we remember and what passes through us, that the true promise of the contemporary museum is hidden: not merely to show us the world, but to make us perceive that we can still transform it — because we accept the baton of the existential relay, because we attune ourselves to that ultra‑human commandment that asks us to move, to go, to rise and walk, to believe that we are made for an “elsewhere” to be discovered, not invented as the gratification of a passive and static, a‑cognitive sensoriality that rejects any expression outside the narrow zone of primary individual and collective instincts.

Yet there is an even deeper, subtler, more radical plane: sensuality, which, as a believer, I simply cannot help but regard as one of the most extraordinary attributes of my God.

Sensuality is not eroticism: it is a living relation between bodies and, for me, between dimensions. It is what happens when an intelligent entity reveals itself by revealing you; when a work calls to you, when a room invites you in, when a light grazes you. It is the difference between observing and being observed. Between walking and being guided. Between perceiving and desiring.

Museum sensuality is made of proximity, of calibrated distances, of the curves of the path, of welcoming shadows, of surfaces that suggest, of pauses that breathe. It is a museum that does not impose, but seduces in the highest sense: it draws you toward knowledge, it does not hand it to you.

And so sensoriality and sensuality become two faces of the same coin, of the same threshold. The first activates the body, the second gives it direction. The first opens perception, the second opens desire. The first makes you feel, the second makes you draw near.

In a time when culture risks becoming a fast consumption, a scrolling, an accumulation of information, the museum can return to being what it has always been: a place of embodied transformation. A laboratory of awareness, a perceptual landscape in which the visitor does not “learn,” but allows themselves to be changed.

Perhaps the real question is not whether we are becoming more cultured. Perhaps the question is whether we are still capable of letting ourselves be touched. Because culture is not what we know, but what passes through us. It is not what we look at, but what alters us. It is not what we understand, but what makes us desire to understand again.

So yes: museum sensoriality and sensuality are not a whim, but a necessity. They are the way the museum learns to speak to the whole body again. They are the promise that, upon entering a room, we can still be reborn a little.

So what is truth, if not the possibility of grasping our own awareness at the end of our personal existential evolution?

Let us return now to the theological coda. Every creed is, first of all, a proposal for a cognitive experience, one that does not separate the domains of reactivity within the psychosomatic unity, but involves them, integrates them, permeates them, transforms them, and allows them to evolve. Every divine act, whatever the tradition, enacts this didactic paradigm, this strategy of connection. It is not a frontal or academic exposition, but an experience, an existence integrated into another life, so as to make that life more vital, more complete.

It is not a matter of elevating culture to the status of faith, but of understanding how the most decisive aspects of our search for the meaning of existence enact their revelations in ways so different and so superior, without the use of dazzling effects, to anything our species has managed to produce so far. The cognitive act, therefore, assumes a value higher than any other human activity: from the command of the angel Gabriel (Jibrīl), who appears to Muhammad ordering him to “read” or “recite,” to Moses’ question before the burning bush, everything urges us toward a form of understanding that involves us, permeates us, reveals us, and makes us aware of what we shall become, because it will make us be.