A journey through ancient questions and contemporary museums, in search of what defines us.

In the previous cover piece, carried by the long afterglow of the Christmas holidays, I reflected on sensuality as a frontier between existential dimensions and cognitive activities, and on how the museum can foster this encounter, this process.

Today, just past the turning point of the Christian‑Catholic Easter, I would like to continue this rambling reflection of mine — suspended between post‑Easter mysticism and professional practice — by considering with you, my dear twenty‑five readers of Manzonian heritage, what might bring Easter closer to museums, aside from free admission.

If you recall (never was a question more clearly an act of rhetorical flourish), in my previous editorial I had brought up that unfortunate fellow Pilate, the ill‑fated prefect of Christ’s time in Palestine who, as some may remember, was tasked with judging Jesus himself. In the midst of his brief interrogation, he posed the most intelligent question in the entire drama of the Incarnation: ‘What is truth?’ (John 18:38) — that is, what this dimension of ours is and what purpose it serves. A little more than a day after his verdict, a group of women, anguished, disoriented, desperate, and in love, went at dawn to the tomb of the Messiah to complete the disastrous incarnation of a God born from the drama of a young girl, lived in the drama of humanity, and died in the most personal drama imaginable. Nowhere will you find the angels asking the poor women who arrived at the tomb of the dead God, ‘What are you looking for?’ to conclude what had begun in a manger. Instead, they are met with a more elegant response to their breathless initiative, a response that nonetheless contains that very question: ‘Terrified, they bowed their faces to the ground; but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen.”’ At least, this is how Catholic tradition attributes to Luke the epilogue of a vigil that lasted through the worst Saturday of their lives.

Easter, at least for me, is the day of doubt, the moment when every certainty has faded, fades, and will continue to fade. On that same day, two poor souls, who knows how many coins of existence they had wagered on the man from Nazareth, were surely calling themselves fools as they wisely left Jerusalem, where the friends of the Crucified had already understood that they risked following their leader in a way far too radical and costly for any aspiring lieutenant of the Messiah. I imagine them on the road to Emmaus, asking themselves what had gone wrong, like brides abandoned the day before the wedding. He had seemed the right one: he healed the sick, raised the dead, had a word for every misfortune and a solution for every inevitability.

Let us now return to Passover, the Jewish one, roughly forty years before (not really: we all know what the number forty signifies in certain cultures) the liberation of the chosen people from the Egyptian “yoke”. There too, everything was set in motion by a question. A most ordinary bush (of doubtful, if not entirely invented, existence, serving purely a didactic purpose) that burned without being consumed, like the conscience of that fallen and humiliated Moses, whose insides must have been churning far more than he ever expected, to the point that he no longer knew whom to ask about his sudden unhappiness.

Easter is, for me at least, the very apotheosis of tormenting questions, the kind that rarely strike you, but when they do, it feels as if your own brother were slapping you in the face, to the point of asking him: ‘Whose side are you on, with me or with whom? Don’t you recognize me anymore? What have I done to you?’ From that moment on, nothing is ever the same again.

Here are Moses, Pilate, the women, the disciples of Emmaus, and even Peter and John: at a certain point in the drama, they all begin to move like actors suddenly deprived of the script of what they are supposed to be performing. Everyone is agitated, no one understands, the lines are skipped, the plot unravels, and the happy ending seems to have slipped away forever.

Allow me one more evangelical aside: what about the Magi and the shepherds, those from some thirty years earlier? They too moved, they too set out, but with a spirit entirely different from the others. They also did not know, yet before taking a single step their existential gap was filled: they were given a solution, a perspective, a key to interpretation, a route, a path that finally made the ordinary exceptional, the wretched joyful, ignorance resolved. The others, instead, were driven only by the desperation of those who realize they have lost far more than a body, a body they had not yet learned to replace, surpass, or see beyond their own comfortable immanence. The transfiguration of a desperate condition into a future of beatitude had coincided with a person, with His physical presence; it overlapped too closely with their existence, their dynamics, their aspirations, their earthly comforts. Perhaps only His mother, and a few others, thanks to that mysterious capacity women alone seem able to cultivate in their innermost depths, managed for an instant to see beyond time, beyond their condition. But that was then, and now nothing more. Now they all find themselves with a box of pieces to assemble, but no instruction booklet, no QR code to connect to the ‘how do we do this now?’ website. The vessel seems shattered into too many fragments. Of all that expectation, nothing remains but frantic movements, like bees deprived of their queen: the meaning of everything is now orphaned of the everything itself.

Starting with the women and continuing with the two from Emmaus, soon information will be given to all the actors in the drama, information that will allow them to move forward in the unfolding of salvation from death. They, in turn, will explain to those who will come to be called Christians how to avoid ending up deprived of these instructions, as precious as life itself, which were present from the very beginning and without which none of them could ever say “I am”.

Now, if you have made it this far unscathed, you may be wondering what museums and visitors have to do with all this post‑liturgical delirium. The answer is the very essence of what we call museums.

Imagine a hypothetical museum itinerary for each of the figures I have mentioned, and imagine placing them at the entrance of a museum. The women would be asked at the ticket desk about the reason for their visit. John and Peter would find themselves in a gallery where the exhibition installations were being dismantled and rearranged to be replicated elsewhere, as if the exhibition never truly ended. The two from Emmaus would appear like visitors who, having hired a guide, suddenly realize that their cicerone is not a guide at all, but the very author of the marvels on display. It was so beautiful for them to listen to Him because He spoke ‘as one who has authority over what He created’ and knew how to set their hearts ablaze. Moses, perhaps, would get lost in the final gallery, worn down by the many questions raised by the holiday group he had brought along. The shepherds and the Magi, the former enrolled in an introductory course, the latter in a university faculty, would spend the day in absolute, ecstatic contemplation of what was displayed, savoring every moment and every aspect, appearance and meaning.

If I were a museum director, I would ask myself what my paying audience is actually seeking, in other words, what kind of tomb I would be curating. The experience of a museum, even the one that appears most linear and simple in its subject matter and didactic structure, could prove useless or even counterproductive for the visitor if the institution is unable to align the paradigm of impression with that of expression, as we would say in research methodology.

Let us be clearer. Just as leaving a sharp scalpel in the hands of an infant can be more than dangerous for the child’s own integrity, a visit to a collection can generate, if not danger, certainly missed opportunities for fulfilling the configuration of those many cultural and existential pieces through which we represent our own existence and that of others. Visiting places filled with masterpieces without bringing the experience into a concrete relationship between the visitor and what is being visited is like reading a book in Chinese while knowing only Latin. It is not guaranteed that one cannot appreciate the object in itself or its graphic result. It is not impossible that such an encounter might spark curiosity. Yet it may also be a missed opportunity (perhaps lost forever) to nourish that configuration necessary for the growth of an ever‑deeper existential awareness, that very quality that makes a visitor a person in search of the most meaningful reasons for their own life. They will seek them on various levels and certainly through very different modes, yet still defining the visitor as someone who, above all, seeks themselves. They may develop with what is displayed a relationship that is more or less fetishistic, or specialist‑professional, or trend‑driven, or even one of boredom, because the football league is on pause and the wife is restless and eager for the free‑admission days

Starting this month, after having addressed the themes of systematics and the evaluation of individual museum systems, and after presenting our project for the self‑financing of museum entities, it is now time, also in relation to this year’s theme focused on defining museum intelligence, to introduce our paradigm for museum management interaction. We begin precisely with the capacity for analysis and the alignment between museum demand and museum supply. Knowing one’s own offer (an aspect that is, incredibly and paradoxically, not secondary for a museum) and designing modulation processes to make it complementary to and consistent with the demand paradigm, thus generating the possibility of a continuous and growing dialogue between visitor and museum, is, for us, the foundational element of every dynamic and every museum activity.

The remark about knowing one’s own museum offer will surely make some colleagues flinch, as such an assertion may seem outrageous to them; yet it reveals a profound truth. It feels like going back to the years when the concept of marketing first appeared in Italy, a concept never truly understood in its vast didactic potential and always confused, alas, not only by the general public but also by many who present themselves as specialists in the field. Marketing is not advertising: they are two different things. The fact that the former includes notions such as communication marketing does not mean it can be confused with promotion.

Are we truly certain, then, that exhibiting culture, in the ways we do and in the forms we observe, is genuinely useful to the community? Are we certain that the people entering our museums are aware of what we could offer them?

If we refer to the definition of the American Marketing Association from 1985, which completed the one from 1960 (Marketing – Giorgio Pelliccelli, UTET 1988), what stands out is the function of ‘listening,’ ‘analysis,’ and interpretation of the market, understood as the relational dimension between needs and satisfactions, which in INFOGESTIONE theory corresponds to the cognitive field:
$$\frac{f_I}{f_E}$$
(https://www.comunicazioniculturali.com/2026/03/campo-cognitivo/)

In our now well‑established experience, this relationship reveals itself as increasingly rich in aspects that illuminate the characteristics of the interactions among the subjects of a cultural ecosystem. Thus, as anticipated, in the coming months we will present a series of tools and methods designed to develop the function of intercepting and analyzing both museum supply and museum demand. Some of these, such as the experimentation with a proprietary, fully controlled social media platform conducted by Network Museum People, are already available on the homepage.

There remains now only to address an opening that may have seemed almost blasphemous to some. Well, technically there would be nothing to object to. From a theological standpoint, I have cited elements exactly as ecclesial tradition has handed them down. But why, then, place the heart of the creed of a billion people (myself included, a Christian of the Catholic rite and Roman tradition) alongside museum practice? The intention was by no means derogatory, if only out of respect for a story that involves the suffering and death of a man.

As I write, the whole world is preoccupied with the many wars underway: energy, inflation, costs, market instability, political instability. Rarely do I hear references to entire ethnic groups, nations, communities, groups of people, like you who are reading, who risk disappearing from the face of the earth, who have endured deprivation and death for years.

Are we certain that we, in the cultural‑educational sector, have done our part throughout these years? What is humanity seeking, beyond market stability, political stability, curbing inflation, containing costs, and access to energy at reasonable prices?
Are we certain that the answer to the problems of our planetary coexistence, in 2026, is violence, which is spreading ever more in all its forms?
What was that phrase again, “Beauty will save the world”, the expression found in The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which crowds of well‑fed fools have parroted without perhaps even having read it?

So tell me, then, what are you seeking, what are we seeking, now that we are at the mercy of swaggering fools who, at various levels, have made it their mission to safeguard egos and narcissisms with fractal patterns. What are we to do with beauty if we only wish to possess it, without even knowing where it resides, if we have understood nothing of that phrase?

Tell me what you seek, and what people might seek in our museums, in our lectures, in our vernissages, in our schools, in our universities, in our… miseries, if we are not even capable, out of pride and ignorance, of listening to whether and what we have to share, whether and what others might want from us.

Tell me what you seek, if not merely the amplification of instinctive, selfish, narcissistic interests aimed at distinguishing ourselves from the masses in order to secure a place in the sun.

Tell me, what do you seek, what do we seek, what might they seek from us, we who have failed by confusing beauty with aesthetics, sharing with popularity, truth with existence, life with death.

What do you seek?