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the collection

This collection has been on show permanently since January 1998 and can be enjoyed in a historical container with a high monumental value, which is in itself a metaphor of cultural property and of the value of memory. Something which is not usually thought as an "object to be shown in a museum" has been musealized here: the lyric poetry of the 20th Century and the pictorial art of the postwar period. These "forms" confront the contents which, differently from their container - concern recent, contemporary history, but that the collection aims at proposing as "present", in order to give the season of the Resistance the value of foundation of the historical moment we are living. A value of foundation which has been present, and to a great extent, throughout the political history of the postwar period, sometimes even in an ambiguous way (the "criticism of the weapons" of terrorism), but that is here proposed in a linear and essential way, as a historical experience belonging to us all. Therefore poets identify with that time and painters comment on it, accepting to place themselves in it as "heirs", children and grandchildren, without any ideological or polemic charge. The ensemble is a monument made of not monumental things; it actually aims at creating memory without ideology, but at the same time it has the purpose and the task of transmission. In this sense, it is an original answer to the debate about the crisis in the relationship with the past, which has characterized the end of the last century and the beginning of this millennium.

This art collection wants to help the knowledge of the Italian Resistance, showing it in colours, shapes and different materials without any sort of rhetoric or manneristic reconstruction. In these 104 works, through the filter of art, one can directly approach a peculiar moment of our history, with its light and its shade.

The memory of the past cannot get lost, even though its preservation is a hard and difficult task; even though its recollection involves a judgement, maybe a doubt, a reflection. This is our message, the strong idea of our research: the past is the ground of the present. Primo Levi, in one of his last poems, a sort of will, says that in the individual and collective past are the threads weaving the cloth of our existence.

The Mayor of the city where the collection will be kept, remembers us that "the new that rises from the new is just a pretext to cancel every value"; the Provincia Councillor declares that "the honour bestowed by citizens upon their country is honour bestowed upon themselves"; the President of the Province affirms that "a collection inspired by the Resistance is an open book for our meditation".

These words, their ethical value, represent the reason why we have chosen, as the best seat for this art collection, the historical museum in the Rancia Castle of Tolentino. Here these value, in the form of works of art, will be guarded and offered to the young generations as an unforgettable bond with the past.

Carmine landoli