A Captivating Journey into Art: Chiara Matteazzi's Il Museo Nazionale Collezione Salce

Thanks to the restoration work of the Ministry of Culture, directed by the architect Chiara Matteazzi, the thirteenth-century Church of Santa Margherita has been transformed into the true "home" of the Salce Collection. This immense patrimony of graphics gives the place back its ancient role as a treasure trove of art, as it was once very rich in frescoes, including the fourteenth-century cycle of the Stories of Sant'Orsola, by Tommaso da Modena. The new Museum makes extensive use of new technologies to provide visitors with an immersive reality of posters that unite the Salce & Renato Casaro Collection and an Interactive Digital Waterfall, as well as to make it easy for scholars to examine the Collection. A computerized system makes it possible to have the poster available in just a few moments, which is taken from one of the two hundred drawers of the vertical archive where the materials are kept in a controlled environment. This highly armoured technological sancta sanctorum is located on the ground floor of a reinforced concrete parallelepiped, located in the centre of the church, with the logic of the box within the box.

The Museum is divided into two locations in the historic centre of Treviso, a short distance from each other. The headquarters in the San Gaetano complex was inaugurated in 2017, and the headquarters in the Santa Margherita complex was inaugurated in June 2021. On the first level, the management offices of the Museum are located, and on the "terrace" overlooking the museum spaces and the bare wall surfaces of the ancient church, a multifunctional exhibition area of ​​about 450 square meters has been created. Outside the church, the ancient cloister has been partially restored and the spaces redesigned to give an idea of ​​what this sacred place must have been like. The collection consists of about 25,000 posters collected by Salce throughout his life, from 1895, when he bought gas incandescence, Auer patent by Giovanni Maria Mataloni, at the age of eighteen, up to 1962, the year of his death. It offers an interesting and varied cross-section of the society, culture and entrepreneurial realities of the first half of the 1900s, ranging from advertising posters for industrial products, often the work of the greatest graphic artists of the time, to cinema posters, from advertising for tourist locations, promotions of cultural and sporting events, and much more. Private donations have been added to this collection, bringing it to almost 50,000 posters.