Perhaps nothing brings to mind the concept of mobility as directly as geographical charts. Maps help us during journeys as an indispensable practical support for physical movement, or they invite us to travel with the imagination, so that what actually moves is the mind of the one who uses maps to dream, plan and study. 

The Travelling Maps exhibition, however, proposes a change of perspective from this immediate and almost natural affinity between mobility and maps: in the section Pages on the Move the maps contained within the covers of the atlases donated by Morbiato are in fact stripped of their traditional role of providing a context and assistance for travel, and instead they themselves become the protagonists, the objects in motion. What paths have they taken from the moment of their publication to their arrival in Armando Morbiato’s library and, now, in the museum? 

Our guides in these space-time explorations are the ex libris and the ownership notes left between their pages by their past owners. Like pebbles left as markers on the paths of history, they guide and direct the encounter between those who over time succeeded one another as custodians of these items and reveal intriguing historical-geographical stratifications.

A second section of the exhibition, entitled Mobile Maps, concentrates on a small section of the loose maps donated by Armando Morbiato. Being traditional geographical maps rather than pages from atlases, they lack ownership notes, but nevertheless they open and heighten the reflection on many possible forms of mobility enclosed and revealed by maps.