1. INTRODUCTION

Travelling Maps: Cartographies on the Move in the Morbiato Bequest to the Museum of Geography is the first virtual exhibition created by the Museum of Geography. It represents the intersection of various paths that the museum has explored in its first two years, and at the same time it signals the opening of future avenues of research. For this reason, the title Travelling Maps assumes several different meanings with the aim of outlining unexpected routes by which to discover the museum’s heritage and of proposing new methods of acquiring and disseminating geographical knowledge.

Centred on a part of the priceless bequest of atlases and maps received in 2021 from the collector Armando Morbiato, the exhibition first of all reveals how the young museum is providing answers to many of those who hold items of geographical heritage in their private archives and may wish to give their collections greater significance: thanks to the museum and its growing community, such private collections are now being made accessible to citizens, researchers, teachers and students, and are thereby becoming part of a shared legacy through which to rediscover the value of geography as a branch of knowledge that can map out the great changes of the past and also throw light on the here and now.

Cluverio_Italia antiqua

One of the atlases on display in the Hall of Music at the Museum of Geography

The bequest, as is to be expected of exhibits of a university museum, immediately became an object of study. The first interpretative framework to be applied has been that of the mobility of the items of which it is comprised, in accordance with research under way at the MoHu - Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities that forms part of the Mobility and Humanities Excellence Project within the Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World that houses the museum. Therefore the exhibition does not, as might be supposed, only pay attention to the journeys, territories and landscapes described by these objects and atlases, but it also gives due consideration to the commercial, personal and historical routes that eventually brought them to the museum. What journeys have these items made and what sort of itineraries do they reveal?

This exhibition was mounted with the specific purpose of spotlighting and promoting this initial interpretation of the Morbiato bequest, in the context of the Third Mission project entitled Moving Knowledge/Mobility Expo. Travelling maps began as a temporary physical exhibition held in 2021 at the museum, but today it has become a permanent virtual exhibition designed to give the pathways of meaning identified the chance to continue their journeys, and thus stimulate new reflections and initiate a dialogue with digital users.