The Ginori Museum in Sesto Fiorentino introduces itself. It will have inclusive governance

The Ginori Museum in Sesto Fiorentino was unveiled this morning during a press conference held at the Ministry of Culture in the presence of the minister, Dario Franceschini, the president of the Region of Tuscany, Eugenio Giani, the mayor of Sesto Fiorentino, Lorenzo Falchi, and the president of the Richard Ginori Archive Museum Foundation of the Doccia Factory, Tomaso Montanari. During the museum’s presentation to journalists, they took stock of the first steps of the new institution, which will see inclusive governance designed to enhance the role of associations and the local area, a new logo designed to tell the museum’s history, present and future, a website that is the result of a major investment in digitization and innovation, and a garden finally returned to the local community.

The historic museum, three centuries strong and since 1965 housed in a specially designed building, has been closed since 2013 and was in danger of being abandoned, had it not been for the state’s purchase of the institute in the fall of 2017, following a strong civic movement, with many citizens calling for its rescue: in fact, the ministry had invested 700,000 euros at the time with the aim of reviving it. Thus, in 2018 the theenhancement agreement was signed between the State, the Region of Tuscany and the Municipality of Sesto Fiorentino, which, on December 19, 2019, led to the establishment of the Richard Ginori Archive Museum Foundation of the Doccia Factory, with the aim of preserving, cataloging, studying, communicating and exhibiting an extraordinary artistic, historical, social and economic heritage and making its extremely rich collection of ceramic artifacts a truly common good, accessible and inclusive, exercising an active role in the debate on the present and able to open new perspectives for the future. The Board of Directors, chaired by Tomaso Montanari, is composed of Stefano Casciu, Nicoletta Maraschio, Gianni Pozzi and Maurizio Toccafondi. The director is Andrea Di Lorenzo. He is joined on the staff by conservators Oliva Rucellai and Rita Balleri.

Created together with the Manifattura di Doccia and within the buildings used for production, the Museo Ginori has been a business museum for nearly three hundred years, conceived by its founder, Marquis Carlo Ginori, as the privileged container of the beauty that his factory was capable of creating. The museum preserves three centuries of the history of taste and collecting, representing an international unicum thanks to the richness and historical continuity of its heritage, which tells the artistic, social and economic history of the oldest porcelain factory still active in Italy. Its collection has been notified as a complex of exceptional historical-artistic and archival interest since 1962. It includes about eight thousand porcelain and majolica objects dating from 1737 to 1990, an important collection of sculptural models in wax, terracotta, plaster, and lead from the 18th to the 20th century, engraved metal plates and lithographic stones for printing decorations, an archive of paper documents and drawings (three hundred of which belong to the Gio Ponti fund), a historical library, a specialized library, and a photo library. The collection includes rare artifacts from the manufactory’s early period, as well as serial products by illustrious names in Italian industrial design, luxury and everyday objects, bearing witness to the evolution of artistic styles, customs, science, production techniques and entrepreneurship from the 18th century to the present day. Among the masterpieces are a very rare collection of wax sculptures, casts of works by the major Florentine masters of the eighteenth century; the Venus de’ Medici, theArrotino and theAmore e Psiche in white porcelain (life-size replicas of the famous Uffizi marbles); the eclectic majolica for the Universal Expositions; and the Art Deco ceramics of Gio Ponti, artistic director of Richard-Ginori from 1923 to 1930. Since 1965 the museum has been housed in a building designed by architect Pier Niccolò Berardi, owned by the state and entrusted to the Regional Museums Directorate of Tuscany, which is in need of major renovation work after the years of neglect that followed the bankruptcy of the Richard-Ginori company.

The new Ginori Museum: inclusive governance, new visual identity, website, garden

The first of the points that were presented this morning is the new inclusive governance of the museum. In an innovation that is unprecedented in Italy, alongside the Scientific Committee (which includes Mauro Campus, Flavio Fergonzi, Cristiano Giometti, Cristina Maritano and Diana Toccafondi), the Foundation also has a Social Committee, composed of all the popular individuals who share its mission and wish to contribute to its pursuit by exercising a consultative and supportive function. Free and unrestricted, participation in the Social Committee disregards contributions to endowment or management funds and is governed by agreements, in accordance with the rules of the Magna Charta of volunteerism for cultural heritage. With this form of horizontal solidarity, the Foundation intends to enhance the intellectual and proactive contribution of the world of associations, increase the capacity for dialogue with the local area and offer the community new opportunities for cultural and civic growth.

In terms ofvisual identity, Museo Ginori presented its new logo, designed by Muttnik, a Florence-based graphic design studio. The new logo is the result of a synthesis of its history, its artistic and artisanal tradition, and the inseparable bond that unites it with the factory and the territory. Its design echoes the silhouette of the rationalist building that houses it and that of the water cistern of the Ginori manufacturing plant behind it. The stylized star that surmounts it is taken from those in the Ginori family coat of arms, also widely used as the factory’s trademark. The stencil typefaces recall the “stencil” decoration characteristic of the first phase of activity of the Doccia factory. The use of pre-shaped masks allowed even less experienced workers to decorate the precious porcelain. Along with blue and gold, recurring in the decorative motifs, the colors that characterize the Ginori Museum’s visual identity also include red, which harks back to the struggles of the labor movement that played such a large part in the Manifattura’s history.

The website is also active as of today. The Ginori Museum is indeed still closed to the public, but it already has many stories to tell. To hear them, the first nucleus of the museoginori.org website is now online, which will soon make the extremely rich artistic and documentary heritage of the collections accessible to all. Launching a closed museum site was deemed useful to promote another idea of the museum, bringing to the forefront what commonly remains hidden, namely its being a center of research and cultural production and a community committed to developing a critical dialogue about the past, present and future. Out of this vision comes the idea of putting a podcast at the center of the temporary landing page, telling in words the meaning of a museum that cannot currently be seen, but is alive and ready to share knowledge. Designed and developed by Cantiere Creativo, the site will be open, inclusive, and accessible, with special attention to the needs of visually and hearing impaired users. Its technology is based on Dato CMS, an Italian product already successfully tested by the Uffizi and the Minister of Innovation and Digital Transformation. Although it is a foundation under private law, the Ginori Foundation chose to invest in creating a solution that fully complies with the standards required of public administrations by the Digital Administration Code and to make available free of charge the technological and design solutions it has commissioned and for which it holds the rights, so that they can also be reused by other public entities.

Finally, the garden has been returned to the city: while waiting to reopen its doors to the public upon completion of the renovation and refurbishment work, starting in the third week of May the Museo Ginori will open wide the gates of its garden, a large green space, finally open again to the community of Sesto Fiorentino.

The statements

“I intend to propose the necessary resources to complete the Ginori Museum by the end of the legislature, thus giving certainty of funding to cover all the planned work,” said Culture Minister Dario Franceschini. “To do this, collaboration between the various institutional levels and the Foundation will be very important. That of the Ginori Museum is a beautiful story that, I am sure, will also be a great success. Around this collection there has been a real and spontaneous popular mobilization that has led the Ministry of Culture to launch the recovery of the places for the Museum and the birth of the Foundation.”

“The heritage of the Museo Ginori,” explained foundation president Tomaso Montanari, “holds together some of the peaks of Italian art history with the history of the labor movement. While the Ministry of Culture continues the challenging recovery of the building, the foundation is beginning to carry out its task: to narrate this ensemble, which has few comparisons in the world. To this end, it has equipped itself with a staff to inventory the collection and has entrusted some of the best professionals with the creation of the Museum’s logo and coordinated image, and the creation of a beautiful, accessible and sustainable website. This is the public debut of a Foundation that wants to hold together at every step the production and redistribution of knowledge with the widest participation of citizens. The Social Committee, a true innovation in the landscape of cultural foundations, will allow this mission to be articulated in concrete terms.”

“After the purchase in 2017 and the establishment of the Fondazione Museo Archivio Richard Ginori della Manifattura di Doccia in 2019, I live this further step with great emotion,” said Eugenio Giani, President of the Region of Tuscany. “The preservation and enhancement of an exceptional and unique collection such as this, which possesses a history studded with very important figures in the fields of art, craftsmanship and industrial production, represents a historical fact first of all. But it is also a cultural act of profound civilization: the Ginori artifacts have become art and as such are eternal, alive and contemporary as long as they are left able to tell the story. What will be done thanks to the new project and activity presented today is a great operation with which Tuscany will have another opportunity to speak to the world.”

“For our city,” explains Lorenzo Falchi, Mayor of Sesto Fiorentino, “Ginori and its museum represent a place of identity, of history, the crossroads of many generations of Sesto Fiorentino residents, of artists who with their hands have created unique works of extraordinary beauty. With the creation of the Foundation, together with the Ministry of Culture and the Region of Tuscany, we have secured this priceless heritage, linking it to our territory and starting a path of rebirth that today marks a milestone.”

In the photo, the Ginori Museum building

The Ginori Museum in Sesto Fiorentino introduces itself. It will have inclusive governance

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