SAN CASCIANO -
A dip in the sacred basin with all its wonders, statues, coins, ex-votos.
And many objects that will tell their stories together with those of the people who donated them, men and women, matrons and emperors who have looked out over this tank to entrust their future to water.
In San Casciano, the dg museums of the MiC Massimo Osanna anticipates the ANSA, the sixteenth-century building that will host the 24 bronze statues and all the treasure that emerged from the excavation of the Bagno Grande aims to open to the public as soon as possible.
If everything goes smoothly "within a year", at least the first theaters, he assures.
"Because the important thing is to immediately begin to tell the incredible adventure of these excavations", is passionate about Osanna who cites Pamuk and his famous decalogue, "we think of a museum that is capable of making people's stories universal, even the most minute, especially since the topics on the agenda two thousand years ago in the sanctuary of the Bagno Grande were health, motherhood, faith, in a word, people's lives and expectations, universal and transtemporal values, topics that interest everyone us today as then ".
In fact,
while the wait is strong for an exhibition that should bring some of the 24 wonderful statues to the capital, who knows maybe even at the Quirinale as it
was 50 years ago for the Riace Bronzes, with the ok of the state property that has arrived in these hours the procedures for the purchase of the Palazzo dell'Arcipretura in the historic center of the Tuscan village have come to life.
A meeting on the specifications is scheduled for November 15 at the Ministry of Culture, the administration is determined to move as quickly as possible to ensure the State by the end of the year the ownership of the building which, moreover, had already been identified as last April.
The space is the right one: three floors above ground as well as a large basement and an external room, around 500 square meters in all, which the Curia has agreed to sell for 650 thousand euros.
A fascinating environment full of history with terracotta floors and wooden beams on the ceiling that will now have to be renovated and set up with a project shared between the ministry and the whole team working on the excavation.
A first scientific project already exists, developed by Jacopo Tabolli of the University for Foreigners of Siena who leads the mission, with the excavation director Emanuele Mariotti and Ada Salvi of the superintendence.
And the solution imagined by the archaeologists combined with the ideas of the director Osanna seems to promise an out-of-the-ordinary experience right now.
"Nothing already seen", assures the managing director, that of San Casciano "will be a contemporary museum, with an ever-changing and ever-evolving display of the finds, capable of proposing different narratives over time".
An indispensable starting point, given that in the coming months and years from the tubs of the Bagno Grande and the land surrounding the current construction site (land that the State is determined to expropriate) may come up with who knows how many other surprises.
The idea is to articulate the path on three floors,
starting from the landscape and the stories of the territory and then finding oneself on the first floor in an immersive context, almost as if one entered the seething warmth of the large sacred basin with the bronze offerings, the vegetable ones, the ex-votos.
"Talking" wonders insists Osanna, objects that also thanks to the inscriptions that often cover them tell a lot about the people who wanted them, with stories that come from different worlds, from Siena, Chiusi, Perugia, Rome.
On the still upper floor
the perspective changes, the gaze moves from the inside to the outside, it is the moment of emergence from the water.
And here is the world outside the sanctuary, told for example by coins, given that there are of them for every century of life of this great sacred complex.
But also from the instruments of medicine, the language of the inscriptions that slowly from Etruscan becomes Latin, the vegetable offerings with their mysteries in part still to be solved.
A particularly "lively" museum, Tabolli assures us,
because precisely for the needs of the archaeological mission it will be at the same time the place of the story but also a research center and laboratory.
So much so that the basement will house part of the research hub for students.
A museum like a beating heart of adventure, in short, interconnected and linked to both excavations and studies.
And why not, a little magical: "as welcoming as the great sanctuary must have been two thousand years ago".
(HANDLE).