“Living Museums” and societal change: The National Museum of Palermo between the 1860s and the 1950s

This article engages with a question that is underrated and underexplored in the literature on museum history: how do museums respond to and/or trigger societal, political, and cultural changes? To answer this question, this research applies to museum institutions the Greek philosopher Plato’s well-known observation that no living organism or piece of knowledge stays the same throughout its lifetime, as the fundamental nature of human bodies and knowledge is continuous change. From this perspective, we can ask what elements cause a museum to be perceived as the same museum or a different one over time. In this perspective, we can also further analyze the conditions under which the balance between stability and change breaks down in the long-term life of institutions (in our case, museums). A case study approach seems the most promising strategy to address these questions. It also seems the most well-suited strategy to begin drafting an analytical model that would allow us to identify and analyze the field-of-force system in which museums are embedded by studying the concrete changes museums undergo or trigger in their interaction with societal changes. The case study analyzed in this paper is the National Museum of Palermo: beginning with Antonino Salinas at the end of the nineteenth century, its directors have envisioned the museum as a school and the pinnacle of Sicilian civilization and identity. The analysis presented here identifies various stimuli for change, both exogenous and endogenous, and shows how these forces can coalesce in specific moments of a museum’s life in such a way that, viewed a posteriori, they turn into pivotal turning points.