Alba Di Lieto

Lecturer - Interior Architecture and Exhibition Design- Polo territoriale of Mantua, Politecnico of Milan

Italy, Verona

Alba Di Lieto, served has curator of the Carlo Scarpa drawings collection, responsible for exhibit-design as executive architect of city Museums of Verona, Italy, until August 2022. Currently, she teaches “Interior Architecture and Exhibition Design” at the Polo territoriale of Mantua, Politecnico of Milan. During has service she completed the restoration of two towers of Castelvecchio left unfinished by Carlo Scarpa and contributed to the conservation of the Museum’s Master’s set up. She collaborated on restoration, conservation, lay out of arrangements of the Archaeological Museum at the Roman Theater, and the the Frescoes Museum “G.B. Cavalcaselle" at Juliet's Tomb, in Verona.

She designed the set - up of 60 exhibitions and collaborated on Carlo Scarpa’s exhibitions in Paris, London, Edinburgh, Geneva, Verona and Montréal. She is the author of books on exhibit design: Allestire nel museo: trenta mostre a Castelvecchio, 2010 and La continuità dell’esporre 34 mostre nei musei di Verona, 2023.

She is also author and editor of several books on Carlo Scarpa and the website: www.archiviocarloscarpa.it, and the Carlo Scarpa’s drawings catalogue for the Museo di Castelvecchio (2006). She contributed to “Technical specifications of materials” and ”The Museum after Carlo Scarpa” in Carlo Scarpa and Castelvecchio Revisited by Richard Murphy (2017), “A Well-Sited Archive at the Castelvecchio Museum” in The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models, edited by Federica Goffi, (2022).

Carlo Scarpa: the life of a display case

The contribution aims to narrate my direct experience as the exhibit design manager of a museum set up by Carlo Scarpa, a master of modern architecture recognized internationally, the methods of conservation and recovery of the heritage he left to the Museum of Castelvecchio, one of the Museums of Verona, Italy.
Castelvecchio is a 14th-century castle transformed into a museum in 1926 and reformed by Carlo Scarpa in the 1960s. A "heroic" period of the rearrangement of Italian museums, the subject of lively debate among architects and art historians, on the criteria for the restoration of monuments and the educational function of museum exhibit design. 
My testimony begins in 1986 with the setup of the exhibition: Veronese Miniature of the Renaissance. The exhibition presented manuscripts inside the display cases designed by Carlo Scarpa in 1960, which the museum had kept in storage and which I restored and adapted for the occasion. Through various exhibition setups of art, architecture, and design, the narrative concludes in 2022 where, in the same display cases and in the same space, the architectural drawings of Ferruccio Franzoia, a student of Carlo Scarpa, were exhibited. 
The initial and intuitive "good practice" of preserving and reusing the exhibit devices designed by a Master subsequently became a systematic practice; these objects were stored and reused in a warehouse of exhibition structures, and a database with a schedule for each individual element was created. Over the years, the heritage has also been enriched with structures designed by other architects. 
The direct contact with the heritage and legacy left by Carlo Scarpa and the appreciation of his work has given new life to the “display case” and “easel” designed by the Master. From devices dedicated to the presentation of artworks, they have become exhibit "objects" in the Carol Bove/Carlo Scarpa exhibition curated by Pavel S. Pyś, which had three important international stages in Europe. 
 

Carlo Scarpa, display case, testimony, conservation, recovery.