A net of small museum for policies of planning, safeguard and government of Mediterranean archeological landscape

We propose an integrated plan of small museums (antiquaria), strongly deep-rooted in the reference archaeological areas, in the northern Mediterranean region of Tunisia, where there are numerous sites of great value, sometimes not very well-known, that show basic analogies and common tourist-cultural interests. We have been able to point out, and not only in Tunisia, that still today the most important classical museum systems draw on the nineteenth-century idea of Vivant Denon, that is the great museum holding, in a succession of numerous expository halls, different collections coming from several parts of the region, in order to exalt the great variety and the treasures of the national territory. Today this system appears very damaging for the more distant sites that are actually deprived of their memories to advantage of the capital, to be actually deprived of local testimonies, also of great dimension, as well as of great value. The structures considered more suitable to support a diffused cultural tourism are, on the contrary, small museum architectures situated inside the archaeological areas that privilege a more direct and immediate approach with the reference context. To this aspect of “ecomuseum”, we should add an important program of communication for the implementation of a virtual dimension of the museum itself, that can be supported both in the sphere of the antiquarium, in specific fields dedicated to the projections of the reconstruction examples, and for the communication of a “virtual museum” to visit on-line. Today the aspect of the virtuality represents one of the most explicit forms through which a museum tries to promote itself and to renew the interest for the art works it preserves, in a more and more demanding and competitive tourist cultural context.