Look at me! The museographic project beneath the Italian Museum of Planetary Sciences in Prato (Italy)

Designing museum exhibitions is a hot topic for architects, designers, museologists, and scholars since museography represents a powerful tool for valorizing collections, promoting education, communicating cultural values, and ensuring suitable conservation conditions for the exhibited specimens. This is especially true for museums displaying authentic objects which are conveyors of scientific, cultural, social, and ethical values. In particular, natural history and science museums often compete with the leisure industry, and thus their museographic solutions have to meet more and more demanding requirements to increase visitor engagement. This paper describes the museographic concepts beneath the Italian Museum of Planetary Sciences in Prato (Italy, hereinafter MISP). MISP is the only museum in Italy entirely devoted to illustrating planetary sciences and displays important collections of extraterrestrial materials (meteorites, tektites, and impactites). The exhibition layout, characterized by a continuous wall belt design, recalls the outer space while providing non-invasive visual means to improve visitors’ emotional engagement with the displayed specimens. MISP museographic strategies also outline the importance of spatial designs and transpositions focusing on the illustration of the exhibited collections, thus going against some current museographic practices emphasizing, for example, the use of augmented reality and digital stimuli.

Graphical abstract