Museums and Travel
Travel designer
with Suzana Amalia Nemeș
Museums and Travel is the new column through which Network Museum aims to investigate and share the relationship between movement, understood as travel, stay, and the connection with territories outside of our daily lives, and cognitive-cultural activity, with a particular focus on the role of museums.
With this interview, we are launching a new section and a new way for our Guests and Readers to interact
Museums and Travel, in fact, is the new column through which Network Museum aims to investigate and share the relationship between movement, understood as travel, stay, and the connection with those territories that are not part of our daily lives, and cognitive-cultural activity, with particular focus on the role of museums.
It stems from the collaboration of various spin-offs of INFOGESTIONE, the research institute of which Network Museum is the specialist branch dedicated to museum sciences. The first, Alma Itinera, has the mission of investigating the relationship between movement and learning; the second, Network Museum Explorer, focuses on museums as destinations and cognitive experiences. Furthermore, a fundamental contribution is provided by the Management Cultural Community, the branch of our institute that for years has studied the process of formation, aggregation, and loyalty of cultural communities.
For a research institute that has been interested for over thirty years in how knowledge propagates and the influences it has on our individual and collective evolution, investigating travel means exploring a “cognitive dimension” or, as we say in our doctrine, a “realignment of the cognitive field” towards the functions of association and permanence. These functions shift the balance of the cognitive configuration from an invasive and intrusive flow of impressions from the outside, to a greater sensory work and presence of self, with all the implications related to the perception of one’s surroundings and existential awareness. All of this was intentionally introduced by the cover published on our homepage, which addresses the theme of “expressiveness” and the expression of the museum visitor as a fundamental component of the mission and cultural offering of such institutions.
One final innovation consists of a new way of engaging with our scientific publication and our institute. For over fifteen years, we have been publishing editorials, scientific articles, and interviews. We have recognized the need on the part of some of our Guests, and the opportunity for our management, to allow for the sharing of editorial expression, its extension, and its completion. This is achieved by allowing new Invitees, introduced to our editorial team by the interviewed Guests themselves, to voice their thoughts as a completion or a deeper exploration of the contributions made by their colleagues. Today, in the language of “reality show” television formats, these individuals would be called “nominees” (nominate); however, in our “virtuous” case, this is not to eliminate anyone, but to enjoy and share the experience and expertise of new Guests.
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
Born in Bucharest and raised in Milan, she has developed since childhood a deep sensitivity towards culture as a space for freedom and discovery. Following a solid background in Public Relations at IULM University, with a specialization in Cultural Economics, she worked for twenty years at a European level in the field of institutional and corporate communication.
Today, she lives and works in the Veneto region, where she founded her own professional practice, Amalia Travel Designer, of which she is the owner. In her capacity as a Travel Designer and Cultural Heritage Interpreter, she applies the most rigorous methodological standards to the design of experiential itineraries that celebrate Italian identity, chosen with awareness and dedication as her adopted homeland.
This is the case with the first Guest of our new column, Suzana Amalia Nemeș, a cultural heritage interpreter specializing in ‘Travel Design’ and owner of ‘Amalia Travel Designer’. She was introduced to our editorial team by Gisele Cipriani, herself a heritage interpreter, during her own interview, which you can find published on this site in the ‘Museums and Professions’ section.
Network Museum
Who is Suzana Amalia Nemeș?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
I am a woman who learned to look at Italy before understanding it, and to understand it before loving it. I was born in Bucharest in the 1970s, in a world where culture was simultaneously the only granted freedom and the most closely guarded terrain. Perhaps it was there that I developed that particular sensitivity toward heritage: when beautiful things are kept at a distance, you learn to desire them deeply.
I arrived in Milan as a child with my parents during the ferment of the 1980s, with a single suitcase and a curiosity that has never ceased. Milan shaped me: intellectually, professionally, and humanly. I studied Public Relations at IULM with a specialization in Cultural Economics, and for twenty years, I worked in the communication sector across various parts of Europe, creating stories for others.
Then, three years ago, I moved to the Veneto region and began building travel experiences around what I have always loved, becoming a Travel Designer and Cultural Heritage Interpreter. But above all, I am a person who has chosen Italy with full awareness, multiple times, and each time with greater conviction.
Network Museum
What is culture and what is its role?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
Culture is the map with which a community orients itself through time and the tool through which human beings give meaning to their own existence. If I were to define it through the lens of my experience, I would say it is a living ecosystem of meanings, the shared software that allows a community to interpret reality and interact with it.
Its purpose, first of all, is to remember: without culture, every generation starts from zero, unaware of the errors and achievements of those who came before. Then, to connect: because culture is the common language that spans differences and ensures that anyone can feel at home in front of a fresco by Giotto. And finally, to transform: as the encounter with a place, with a tradition, never leaves us the same as before.
It serves, therefore, to nourish awareness, to dismantle prejudices and, above all, to generate that sense of universal belonging that makes us human. It is the primary tool for translating the unknown into something familiar.
Network Museum
What is a museum and what is its role?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
A museum is a space of negotiation between the past and the present. It is a place where the community decides what deserves to be preserved, and in this act of choice, it reveals its values, its priorities, and its hidden shadows.
Its role today is more complex and more urgent than is commonly recognized. The museum must be at once a vigilant guardian and a mediator, an archive and a laboratory. It must preserve without embalming and narrate without simplifying, opening its doors without stripping depth from what it safeguards. And above all, it must have the courage to ask itself: for whom does it exist? Not in a demographic sense, but in an existential one. A museum that does not ask this question risks becoming a monument to itself, beautiful, perhaps, but mute.
Network Museum
What does it mean to interpret cultural heritage?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
To interpret heritage means to build bridges. Not just between the past and the present in a generic sense, but between an object, a place, or a story and the specific person standing before it, with their own questions and their own sensitivity.
For me, heritage interpretation is not a mere explanation, but a complex and vital architecture. As one of the most profound definitions in the field states, it is simultaneously a philosophy, an engagement strategy, and a management tool. It is a philosophy because it requires a way of looking at the world that seeks the deep meaning and universal value hidden in every artifact or landscape. It is a strategy because I aim to ignite a spark in the traveler, transforming the visit into an active and personal dialogue. Finally, it is a management tool because a visitor who “understands” and “feels” the heritage naturally becomes its primary guardian, promoting responsible and conscious tourism.
Freeman Tilden, the father of heritage interpretation, said that interpretation is not instruction, but provocation. It is about igniting something, creating the conditions for a person to begin to look, and not just see.
In my case, interpreting also means not substituting oneself for the experience of the other. My job is not to tell others what to feel in front of a work of art. It is to prepare the ground, contextually and then culturally, to leave the other with the freedom to wonder in their own way, without the filter of my vision.
Network Museum
What is a journey? What does it mean to travel?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
Traveling is one of the few human experiences that manages to be, simultaneously, an act of opening toward the outside and a journey back toward oneself. We set out convinced we are going to discover a landscape, a culture, or a language, and we return with a clearer, and often more uncomfortable, knowledge of who we are.
There is, therefore, this paradox at the heart of the journey: the more you immerse yourself in what is different from you, the more you understand what you are. The encounter with the “other” reveals you. It shows you the boundaries you didn’t know you had, the values you took for granted, and the habits you believed were universal, only to discover they are simply your own. In this sense, stepping out of one’s comfort zone is an exercise in courage and an epistemological act. I would say it is the most direct way I know to learn something true about oneself.
And then there is the dimension of connection. Travel brings us into contact with people who think differently, who have built their world with cultural materials different from ours. This encounter, if it occurs with preparation and presence, does not necessarily produce a total understanding of the other. It would be presumptuous to think so. Instead, it creates a recognition of one’s own partiality. And this identification is already a more evolved form of humanity.
Traveling, therefore, is moving inward while moving outward.
Network Museum
What is Amalia Travel Designer?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
It is an experiential design laboratory where travel is stripped of its purely commercial guise to rediscover its dimension as a cognitive ritual. I would say it is the synthesis of twenty years of expertise in communication and public relations, placed at the service of beauty and heritage interpretation. Through Amalia Travel Designer, I have sought to answer two questions:
- What would happen if a journey were designed with the same care used to build a professional training path?
- And what would it be like to offer an itinerary conceived starting from the person, from their questions, their history, what they carry within and what they seek, rather than from what they see on social media?
These answers are the heart of my methodology, which is based on pre-visit cultural preparation. I believe that the quality of a museum or territorial experience depends decisively on what happens before arrival. A visitor who enters a place with their sensitivity already activated lives a qualitatively different experience compared to someone who arrives “cold”, because they are significantly more present. Presence, understood as focused attention, standing before a landscape or a work of art, makes all the difference.
The other fundamental dimension of my method is the co-creation of meaning: a journey is not something that happens to the traveler, but something the traveler actively contributes to building. My role, therefore, is that of a facilitator who creates the right conditions so that the experience becomes meaningful for that specific person, at that exact moment in their life.
Network Museum
To whom do you cater? Who are your clients? Why should one choose the services of Amalia Travel Designer?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
Our counterpart is not the ‘tourist,’ but the “seeker of stories”. We cater to cultured, curious travelers who wish to go beyond the surface of the postcard to immerse themselves in the authenticity of the territories.
Choosing Amalia Travel Designer means entrusting oneself to someone who offers not only a privileged key to interpreting the territory but also a total engagement in the journey. My value proposition is the transformation of the way one understands reality, through a conscious and unforgettable exploration.
Network Museum
To what extent and in what way can the dimension of travel influence cognitive activity and its relationship with the sphere of existential, individual, and collective awareness?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
The influence of travel on cognitive processes is well-documented. When we immerse ourselves in a new cultural context, the brain is forced to step out of its automatic patterns: it must read the world through different parameters, build new connections, and suspend habitual categories. This effort, which may seem destabilizing, is actually one of the most fertile conditions for deep learning; that is to say, for a restructuring that changes the very way we interpret reality.
At the level of individual awareness, a well-designed cultural journey has the capacity to trigger what I call a “productive dislocation” effect: it temporarily removes you from your normality, your language, your habits, and your points of reference. In this space of suspension, something becomes clear. Questions you were unable to formulate suddenly find a shape, and certain priorities emerge with unexpected sharpness.
On a collective level, the discourse becomes even more significant. A community that travels with awareness and engages with other traditions, without the need to diminish them or exalt them uncritically, is a community that develops what we might call “cultural intelligence”. That is, the ability to exist within complexity without anxiety, and to find points of contact without erasing differences.
Network Museum
How do you consider the theme of physical and cognitive inclusion in cultural travel?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
For me, inclusion is not a checkbox to be ticked on a list of requirements. It is a question that must be asked at the very beginning of every project, when the experience is being designed, rather than as a final corrective measure.
On a physical level, the issue is well-known, although it is still often addressed with solutions that make those who need them feel like an exception, rather than a natural part of the public. However, it is on the cognitive level that the work to be done is most urgent and profound. Cognitive inclusion means designing experiences that do not require a degree to be relevant.
It means finding the visual, narrative, sensory, and emotional languages through which an extraordinary heritage like Italy’s can speak to people with radically different backgrounds, ages, abilities, and life stories. Inclusion certainly does not lower the level of the experience; instead, it enriches it for everyone.
Network Museum
How do you relate to museums and the national museum system?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
My relationship with the Italian museum system is that of someone who loves something deeply and, precisely for that reason, cannot stop wondering how it could be even greater than it already is.
Italy holds a vast portion of the world’s artistic heritage. It does not dominate through absolute quantity alone, but through continuity, stratification, and its presence in daily life, where art is not the exception, but the environment itself. I would say that the problem is not the wealth of the heritage, but the system through which we too often communicate it and make it accessible.
Many Italian museum institutions still operate with models conceived for a public from the last century: encyclopedic captions, linear paths, and the idea of a visit as a passive consumption of information. This approach, however respectable in its tradition, struggles to engage with a contemporary visitor who has profoundly different cognitive habits, someone accustomed to navigating knowledge in a non-linear, relational, and experiential way. I do not believe we should lower the level; rather, we must find new languages that do not betray the depth of the content.
This is where my work fits in. Amalia Travel Designer acts as a bridge between the museum and the visitor: I arrive beforehand, I prepare the ground, and I create the conditions for the encounter to be meaningful. For a museum, this means receiving a public that is already activated, curious, and equipped with the tools to go beyond the surface.
It is a form of collaboration that, when it works, produces extraordinary results for both parties. However, there is a critical aspect that I cannot fail to mention: the Italian museum system still suffers from a certain difficulty in recognizing and valuing professional figures who do not belong to its internal structure.
The dialogue with external professionals is often informal, fragmented, and lacking shared protocols. This is not due to a lack of will, in most cases, but to an organizational structure that struggles to open itself up to new collaborative models.
Network Museum
How do you relate to the various professional figures institutionalized by our legal system?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
With deep respect and genuine curiosity toward each figure: the licensed tour guide, the museum educator, the art historian, the conservator. Each profession brings with it a specific knowledge, a perspective that enriches the overall system.
The Travel Designer does not overlap with these figures; they integrate them. My intervention occurs primarily during the design and preparation phase of the experience. On the ground, I gladly and confidently rely on recognized local professionals.
In certain contexts, there is still some rigidity in recognizing new professional figures that do not fit perfectly into the categories codified by the legal system. It is an understandable tension; categories exist to protect, and protection has real value. However, cultural heritage is a living system, and the professions inhabiting it must be able to evolve with the same fluidity. Dialogue between different figures, when it happens with openness and without territorial defensiveness, almost always produces something better than what anyone could achieve alone.
Network Museum
How do you consider museum visitors?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
I consider them the very reason why a museum exists. For me, they are first and foremost its raison d’être, and only secondarily its audience.
This distinction is not merely semantic. An audience is managed, segmented, and measured in entry numbers. A raison d’être is honored and always remembered. Every visitor brings with them a history, questions, and a specific sensitivity. The museum that knows how to welcome all of this, that knows how to create the space for a real encounter rather than simple consumption, is the museum that leaves a lasting mark on people’s lives.
In my work, I refuse to treat the visitor as an empty container to be filled with information. I consider them a co-protagonist of the experience. My task is to create the conditions for this process to occur with the greatest possible depth. The co-creation of meaning is not an alternative pedagogical approach; it is the recognition of a fundamental truth about human learning.
Network Museum
How do you view the “market” and what relationship do you establish with this dimension? Are there deontological responsibilities and ethical limits?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
The market exists, and pretending otherwise would be a form of hypocrisy that simply doesn’t belong to me. Amalia Travel Designer is a business, and as such, it must be sustainable. But economic sustainability is the condition that allows us to do the work that truly matters well.
The fundamental ethical limit is not to simplify for the sake of selling. Cultural heritage can and, indeed, must be made accessible, but without being trivialized, sensationalized, or reduced to a hollow emotional experience. There is a fine line between making content engaging and turning it into substance-free entertainment. Staying on the right side of that line requires constant vigilance and a solid cultural foundation.
Furthermore, there is a deontological responsibility toward the workers in this sector. The world of Italian culture is inhabited by extraordinary professionals who often operate under economic and contractual conditions that do not remotely reflect the value of their contribution. It is an uncomfortable subject, but a real one. A healthy cultural system cannot rest solely on the sacrifice and passion of those who inhabit it: it needs to recognize, including economically, the work of those who bring it to life every day.
Network Museum
What relationship exists between your professional role and various educational, academic, and scientific institutions?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
I consider these relationships among the most precious and full of unexpressed potential. Schools and universities are the places where both the visitors and the cultural professionals of tomorrow are formed. Building bridges with these institutions is a specific goal of mine for the near future, as they are where research and methodologies are produced.
I would like to facilitate their translation into operational practices accessible to the general public and build a structured system.
Network Museum
How do you judge the Italian system of cultural propagation? What is happening abroad?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
Italy possesses a heritage that is unparalleled in the world, yet it often relies on a cultural communication system that is not yet worthy of what it safeguards. It is frequently a structural issue: institutional fragmentation, insufficient resources, and a tradition that tends to privilege conservation over dissemination, and protection over accessibility.
Abroad, particularly in Anglo-Saxon and Northern European countries, I have observed an approach to cultural mediation and heritage interpretation that is more systematized, more institutionally recognized, and better compensated. British, Dutch, and Scandinavian museums invest significantly in designing the visitor experience as an integral part of their mission. And the results are clear: wider, more loyal, and more aware audiences.
However, it is not about copying foreign models; the Italian context has specificities that must be respected and valued. It is about having the courage to learn, to cross-pollinate practices, and to stop considering the supremacy of our heritage as a sufficient justification for failing to question how we share it. We defend beauty when we make it part of the lives of those who look at it, not when we lock it in a display case.
Network Museum
How do you combine your intervention with the expectations of audiences increasingly accustomed to technological devices and virtual effects?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
It is a fundamental question, yet one that is often incorrectly framed in public debate. There is a tendency to present technology and authentic experience as antagonists, as if a visitor arriving with a smartphone in hand were already, by definition, a lost cause. I do not see it that way.
Technology is a tool. Like all tools, its value depends entirely on the intention with which it is used and the context in which it is placed. In my work, I gladly use it during the pre-visit cultural preparation phase: a well-crafted podcast, a visual reconstruction, or an interactive map can spark curiosity and build context in a powerful and effective way. But when you stand before a canvas by Titian, the stones of a Roman amphitheater, or a landscape in the Dolomites, technology steps aside.
Because no virtual effect can ever replicate the physical vibration of being in the presence of something real, ancient, and irreproducible. In this sense, my task is also to re-educate toward waiting, slowness, and presence, not as a nostalgic exercise, but as a conscious choice for the quality of the experience. A prepared visitor, who has already digitally encountered the context of what they are about to see, arrives with a greater capacity for presence and often discovers, with surprise, that reality far surpasses any technological mediation.
Network Museum
What are the risks and aspects of technological pressure? How do you view the learning process in a society that lives under the sign of “speed”?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
Speed is perhaps the most profound anthropological challenge of our time. We are witnessing, gradually but measurably, a transformation in how people process knowledge: increasingly horizontal, associative, and rapid; increasingly less vertical, less deep, or contemplative.
The museum, with its nature as a slow, dense space that is not immediately decodable, finds itself in a position of apparent disadvantage in this scenario. But I read it differently. I believe it is precisely this apparent distance from contemporary speed that makes the museum a precious place and, in a sense, more necessary than ever. In an accelerating world, the space of slowness becomes rare and, therefore, valuable. The museum can be the place where we learn, or relearn, to inhabit time differently, no longer as a resource to be optimized, but as a dimension to be crossed with attention.
The real risk of technological pressure is not technology itself; it is superficiality as the norm. It is the idea that understanding means only recognizing, that knowing means having seen, and that an experience is worth only as much as its photogenicity.
Against this drift, the slow and relational learning process is decidedly an act of cultural resistance. It is, at the same time, one of the best investments an individual can make for their own well-being. This is not metaphorical: neuroscientific research tells us that deep learning, exposure to beauty, and active contemplation produce measurable effects on people’s psychophysical well-being. Culture is not just a desire of the soul; it is nourishment for the nervous system.
Network Museum
How does Suzana Amalia Nemeș see the future of culture and, in particular, the future of cultural travel?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
I see it with hope. Not with the naive optimism of one who is unaware of the problems on the ground, but with the lucid hope of someone who believes that moments of crisis and transformation are also, always, moments of possibility.
The future of cultural travel belongs to those who will have the courage to treat culture not as a product to be sold, nor as a temple to be preserved, but as a practice of life.
As something done daily, as a reflex. As a healthy habit of the body and mind, accessible to anyone, regardless of background, income, or education level. Because the joy experienced before a work of art, or the emotion of understanding something that was previously misunderstood, is not a human experience reserved for a few, but one that every single one of us can feel. And as such, it transcends cultural, linguistic, and social boundaries.
The future I imagine is a cultural system that finally has the courage to recognize this truth and build upon it: not museums for the few, but profound experiences for all.
Network Museum
Now a contextualized question regarding the theme of the year: what is an “intelligent museum” and what should ‘intelligent travel’ look like?
Suzana Amalia Nemeș
An intelligent museum is one that has developed the capacity to listen to its visitors and its territory, responding to what it hears with creativity and humanity.
It is a museum that knows its collection is not a destination, but the starting point of a conversation. It designs the visitor experience with the same care it uses to conserve its works. It recognizes its workers as an integral part of the heritage it safeguards, because without competent, motivated, and properly valued people, no collection in the world can truly meet expectations.
It is also a museum that, on one hand, is not afraid to ask uncomfortable questions of itself and its community and, on the other, accepts that it does not have all the answers. It views uncertainty not as a threat, but as the engine of its own evolution.
And intelligent travel? It is the journey that is prepared first internally and only then logistically. It is approached with curiosity and without the anxiety of having to see or understand everything. It is the journey that leaves space for the unexpected, accepts slowness as a method, and considers the encounter with “the other” a true joy.
Traveling intelligently means returning home different, with greater awareness, an awareness that translates into psychological, emotional, and relational well-being. Because contact with that layered, complex, living beauty that Italy safeguards in every corner of its territory doesn’t just embellish the moment it occurs. It leaves a permanent trace in the way one looks at the world and amplifies the capacity for wonder. And wonder, as the Greeks knew well, is the beginning of all knowledge.
This is the promise of intelligent travel. And it is a promise that is always worth keeping.
© Copyright Infogestione
Coordinates of this page, sources, links, and further insights.
Coordinate di questa pagina, fonti, collegamenti ed approfondimenti.
Title/Titolo: Travel designer/Travel designer
Section/Sezione: Museums and Travel/Musei e viaggio
Author/Autore: by Editorial Staff/ a cura della redazione
Guest/Ospite: Suzana Amalia Nemeș
Code/Codice: INMNET2605071557MAN.A1
Last update/Ultimo aggiornamento: 07/05/2026
Online publication: 7th season, 07 May 2026/Pubblicazione in rete: 7° stagione, 07/05/2026
Intellectual property/Proprietà intellettuale: INFOGESTIONE s.a.s
Content source/Fonte contenuti: INFOGESTIONE – Network Museum
Image source/Fonte immagini: as indicated by the captions placed beneath the images/come segnalato dalle didascalie poste in calce alle immagini
Video and multimedia content source/Fonte video e contenuti multimediali: –
Links for further insights related to the topic/Collegamenti per approfondimenti inerenti al tema: https://amaliatraveldesigner.eu