The rooms of dreams: thirteen house museums are told on Radio3 – Arte.it

Thirteen places between reality and imagination are told through fragments of existence and small memories.
It happens for seven nights, from December 13 to January 24, over the course of the series The rooms of dreamsseven episodes broadcast every Saturday at 10:30 PM on Radio3 in the Radio3 Suite and can be listened to again on the RaiPlay Sound platform.
The cycle, conceived by Flaminia Gennari Santori, art historian, author and independent curator, former director of the National Galleries of Ancient Art (Palazzo Barberini and Galleria Corsini) from 2015 to 2023, arose from a question: why do spaces sometimes outside of time, such as house museums, exert such a deep fascination?
The answer can be found in each episode, which brings together two houses that have something in common. During this journey, the house museums reveal themselves through their essence as microcosms capable of reflecting the major historical, cultural and political issues of the time. Literature also becomes a compass to orient oneself between the culture and ambitions of the hosts. A journey into the imagination, history and intimacy of those who have chosen to transform their home into a total work of art. The listener is invited to explore very different contexts, from the sixteenth century to the present. Twelve houses are located in Italy, while one overlooks the Bosphorus in Istanbul. They can all be visited, with the exception of one, which no longer exists.
We leave from Istanbul, with the Museum of Innocence created by the writer Orhan Pamuk, and then continue towards Rome, to the house of the futurist artist Giacomo Balla. This is followed by a meeting with two friends who lived in the sixteenth century, the bishop, historian, physician and biographer Paolo Giovio and the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, makers of houses conceived as self-portraits.
If Giovio’s house no longer exists, Vasari’s house can still be visited in Arezzo. In the next two episodes the nineteenth century makes its debut, the golden age of the house museum. The residence, invented by the collector Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, enters into dialogue with what was for centuries the palace of the Querini Stampalia family and of the last descendant, Count Giovanni, entrepreneur and philanthropist in Venice.
CASA BALLA, Via Oslavia, Studiolo Rosso, Detail I Photo: M3Studio I © GIACOMO BALLA, by SIAE 2021

From the two houses, both reflections of the Risorgimento culture, the route continues with two inventions inspired by Renaissance art and culture, that of the Milanese collectors Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi and the Florentine of the art historian and collector Herbert Horne.
The twentieth century is told through two visits to very different houses: that of Antonio Boschi and Marieda di Stefano in Milan and that of Francesco Federico Cerruti in Rivoli, near Turin, whose collections reflect the aspirations of the enterprising post-World War II bourgeoisie.
In the next episode we stay in Turin as guests of the homes of two artist friends, the architect Carlo Mollino and the artist Carol Rama, emblematic figures of the Italian cultural scene of the twentieth century.
The darkest and most contradictory side of collecting finally emerges in the final episode of the series, which ends in Reggio Emilia. This is the home museum of Luigi Parmeggiani, an anarchist attacker who turns into an antiques dealer, or rather, a dealer in counterfeit goods bought from the main museums in London and Paris.