Museum of the Risorgimento Lioness of Italy

The result of long historiographical and planning work, the new exhibition itinerary tells the story of the Risorgimento as a phenomenon of European caliber and pressing relevance. Paintings, sculptures, relics and "relics" are read and returned as a material manifestation of the long and complex history that culminated in Italian unification. A rich digital collection accompanies and integrates a narrative that reaches the present day, involving the visitor in the events that saw Brescia at the center of the long Risorgimento, making it famous throughout the world as the Lioness of Italy.

The itinerary embodies a new idea of a historical museum, in which narration plays a leading role and reaches up to the contemporary. The Museum alternates local and European scale, narrative and analysis, objects and digital collections, with the aim of illustrating events, places and protagonists of the history of the Risorgimento in an innovative and participatory way. The exhibition is divided into eight sections and is entirely narrated in Italian and English.

The Leonessa d'Italia Museum preserves and enhances a substantial part of the heritage dedicated to the Risorgimento history of Brescia, mainly the result of donations that the citizens have allocated to the Civic Museums since the end of the nineteenth century. Relics, objects, paintings, flags, memorials and sculptures have thus settled over the course of more than a century, characterizing the Museum's collecting history in a peculiar way. Compared to the previous ones, the new exhibition includes a selection of the most significant pieces, among which recent acquisitions by the Brescia Musei Foundation also stand out, such as the large painting by Jean Adolphe Beaucé General Niel on the Medole field from 1861. Other important objects present along the way they were instead deposited by private individuals or institutions who generously made them available to strengthen the museum narrative.

The Museum's digital collection and multimedia equipment were created as interactive tools to complete the narrative, also for educational purposes. The digital component is treated in the process as a real collection, which possesses the same aesthetic, scientific and narrative dignity as physical objects and is made up of:

Musical tracks, songs activated through proximity sensors that act as background and stimulate learning of the contents;

the Great Atlas of the Risorgimento, an in-depth educational support aimed at retracing the events that led to the current European geopolitical configuration;

Risorgimento, digital exhibit in which the definitions of the key concepts of the eight sections that make up the Museum are proposed, associated with evocative images of the present;

The living room, a re-enactment of the literary and political salons of the early nineteenth century;

The Ten Days of Brescia, an emotional box in which we relive the ten days that made Brescia famous;

The Brescian Garibaldini, an interactive screen to learn about the history of the Brescian participants in the Expedition of the Thousand;

Risorgimento road book, a screen that allows you to view the toponymy dedicated in Italy to the protagonists and most famous events of the Risorgimento;

The fundamental principles of the Italian Constitution, a display on which the first 12 articles of the Constitution of the Italian Republic scroll;

Slideshow, collections of images that serve to expand the historical story.

Finally, located throughout the museum itinerary, there are the Prove di Risorgimento, i.e. screens, which can be activated by raising a handset, in which important documents and literary texts of the Risorgimento are interpreted by the students of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan and by actors of the caliber of Gioele Dix, Maria Paiato and Daniele Squassina.