Fondazione Musei Senesi

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The territory of Siena owes much of its distinct character and quality to its unusual wealth of cultural treasures. The integration of these vestiges of her glorious past with a landscape that is in many ways itself a product of culture has created rich stratifications of events, signs, occasions of memory and testimony that have led to the rise of numerous small civic and diocesan museums, which now house a large part of Siena’s heritage, brought there from churches, palaces, private collections, institutions, and archeological sites. In many cases these are invaluable collections, real documents of civilization, fundamental elements for delineating and embodying the most authentic sense of identity of a territory and the community that lives in it.

One of the most evident differences between a single museum and a system of museums is precisely the ability to draw strength from the integration of many different resources, not only those inherent in the specific cultural institution, but also external to it, rooted in the territory, and to offer itself as one of the various places, not the only one, in which to gain knowledge of a culture that is complex yet coordinated. Each individual unit is thus an autonomous component of a multifaceted whole and gains greater value and meaning precisely in relation to all the other elements.