As the first museum experience for Studio Azzurro, Lucca’s virtual museum explores the memory of the city through a journey in four stages that match four corresponding moments in memory, i.e., evoking, narrating, informing, and documenting.

The introductory hall features footage from cameras scattered around the city that show the sites of the events here narrated. As you walk on, unexpected projections on an evocative route recall episodes from different epochs in the life of the city. Historical images and real-time footage shape the following environment, which is dedicated to narration. Afterwards, ancient maps of Lucca provide information as they are projected on an interactive floor. The last environment offers the history of the Baluardo, which you can read by moving your hand and virtually leafing through a big rusty iron book.

Inside the virtual museum, projections cover brick walls and vaults, violating the darkness of spaces and underscoring the historicity of the site. The rusty iron of the props recalls possible olfactory and tactile sensations evoking the time of memory. Such memory is made of dynamic histories that are rich in popular feeling and move between the crimes and conspiracies of sixteenth-century Lucca and twentieth-century events. Those histories span a long space of time until they reach the small cameras scattered around the city.