Image: Castello D'Albertis Museo delle Culture del Mondo
Castello D’Albertis Museo delle Culture del Mondo in Genoa is showing 'Segninaugurali', an exhibition of drawings by Massimo Chiappetta subtitled in the museum’s announcement 'Origine del pensiero museografico'. It opened on Thursday 16 July 2026 and runs until 4 October 2026. The show gathers the early sketches that shaped the museum’s distinctive display language, giving visitors and researchers a view of the conceptual groundwork behind its museography.
The museum describes the exhibition as documenting the pensiero sorgivo — the originating thought — behind the site-specific installations that have housed the collections and engaged the public at Castello D’Albertis for more than twenty years. Chiappetta, a sculptor and former teacher at the Accademia Ligustica in Genoa, was commissioned in 2004 to design and build the museography for the museum’s opening, working in dialogue with the museum curator, with the indigenous communities from which the collections come and with native artists. That multiple perspective was considered essential at the time for interpreting objects from the Americas, Africa and Oceania with the respect owed to their communities of origin.
Rather than relying on standard museum fixtures, the display was conceived as a series of site-specific installations meant to convey the sense of the objects and show them to best advantage. The museum argues that exposing the preliminary drawings makes visible the thinking that produces the act of display, and returns to the question of what an exhibition actually is.
The drawings are shown not only in the temporary exhibition area but also along the museum route, placing each design document beside the permanent installation it informed and connecting the present layout to the philosophy inaugurated in 2004.
Castello D’Albertis is a museum-house inside a neo-Gothic castle, resting on a sixteenth-century bastion, with ethnographic and archaeological material gathered across five continents by Captain Enrico Alberto D’Albertis, who left the building to the city on his death in 1932, together with holdings from his cousin Luigi Maria D’Albertis.
The exhibition is included in the museum admission ticket, and entry to the opening was free. Until 10 September 2026 the museum is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10.00 to 19.00 and Thursday from 10.00 to 22.00, and closed on Mondays; the Thursday late openings run alongside guided visits to the castle’s secret passages. Information: 010 5578280.
