Ecomuseo Casilino

The Ecomuseum is a cultural institution of the territory based on a pact with which a community undertakes to take care of an area. In particular, a pact means an agreement that is generally shared and not imposed from above by the authorities. The protagonists are not only the institutions, since their role must be accompanied by a broad involvement of citizens and local communities in caring for, preserving and enhancing, for today and for the future, the cultural, environmental and natural heritage. This is done to increase rather than consume its value. The territory is understood in a physical sense, but above all as the history of the people who live there and the relationships and material and immaterial signs left by those who have inhabited it in the past.

The other distinctive element of the Ecomuseum is the concept of widespread musealisation over a territory, even a vast one, unlike normal museums that instead concentrate their activities in a single physical structure. The instance of the urban Ecomuseum is therefore an act of positive exercise and re-appropriation of the rights of citizenship to participate in and influence decision-making processes concerning urban planning choices and the transformation of the urban environment.

To sum up, the constitutive elements of an Ecomuseum are:

Pact: means sharing objectives and strategies, not prohibitions or coercive rules.

Community: means broad participation because institutional initiative alone is not enough.

Care: it means loving and enhancing an area, handing it over to future generations improved, using it with a view to the long term and not hit-and-run.

Territory: means space but also and above all, history, stories, material and immaterial culture, nature and emotions.

The Ecomuseum is a dynamic process in which a community conserves, interprets and enhances its heritage in the function of a shared and sustainable development.