The gradual reopening of the museums in the Canton of Ticino continues: the reopening of the Gandria Customs Museum is scheduled for tomorrow.
The building, built in 1904 and used as a place to protect the border until 1993, houses a unique museum of its kind, which has the task of illustrating and explaining to the public the importance of border management and its long tradition in Switzerland. Alongside the interesting and unusual permanent exhibition, which leads the visitor to discover the new challenges of Swiss customs, the museum, often in collaboration with local institutions, has always organized special exhibitions dedicated to current topics.
It is precisely with a temporary exhibition that the Customs Museum will reopen its doors to the public tomorrow: the Belle Époque tourism. It is a set of vintage posters that are placed in the late nineteenth century. As Lorenzo Sganzini, the curator of the exhibition, says, this exhbition want to tell the advent of Ticino in history of the world.
As recalled by Paolo Campione, Director of the Musec, it is in fact in this historical period that we begin to hear about the Ticino area both at a cultural and tourist level. These period posters propose Ticino as “the South of the North”, linking the Alpine ideal to the Mediterranean one in images, places and atmospheres that are immediately recognizable.
Images with a palpable identity and a strong historical characterization accompany the visitor to discover Ticino over a century ago, in which the lake is recognized as an element present in many posters. Just inside these representations, the public can realize how the idea of the lake itself has changed within the minds. It is no longer the extraordinary but somewhat forgotten lake of Fogazzaro, but rather a meeting place, meeting place, joviality, in an extremely connotating vision of the beginning of the new century.
This same idea is the one that leads, every year, between 8 and 10 thousand people to visit this jewel of culture nestled between lake and mountain, also thanks to the new management by the Museum of Cultures and the numerous institutional collaborations that the museum it has worked in the last period.
This reality, as small as it is precious, has been enhanced thanks to numerous interventions, also thanks to the work of Capitale Cultura International. It is also thanks to the support of the company, which deals with reception services to the public and the management of multimedia experiences, that it was possible to attend the museum not only to reopen in total safety, but also to find a perspective and a story to recount, in active recovery, conducted in synergy with the Museum of Cultures, which has made the Customs Museum a unique cultural and managerial level.