Narrating Magellan Today: An Exhibition About the Circumnavigation in a Small Italian Town

Is it possible today to narrate Magellan’s experience around the world outside Iberia with an exhibition? Even more so, in a rural small Italian town, possibly the most different place from the world of ocean navigation that gave birth to the Portuguese explorer? This was the challenge I faced when I decided to organize the exhibition Il Giro del Mondo in 500 Anni, on display from September 17th, 2022 to January 31st, 2023 in the town of Guastalla, a small renaissance town in the rural heart of northern Italy. The exhibition is designed to take visitors step by step along Magellan’s journey, to visit the places of the circumnavigation and the wonders encountered by its protagonists, from the giants of Patagonia to the penguins of the eponymous Strait.

The planispheres exhibited in the rooms of the local Gonzaga’s Ducal Palace are meant to show how in the age discoveries and encounters different ways of representing the world could exist simultaneously. For a long time, geographers and cartographers debated the possibility of Asia and America being united. Magellan himself, in order to reach the Mar del Sur, i.e. the Pacific Ocean, had to find the passage that still bears his name. Finally, we wanted to show to visitors the connection between this global journey and the local context: Guastalla. On display in the exhibition are a series of objects: paintings, religious vestments, and textbooks, in which the vast world peeps into the erudite culture and daily reality of the small town. Geography books for use in local schools testify to the knowledge about the world and its nature that entered people’s collective awareness. Depictions of animals and plants on textiles and pictorial canvases tell us of a cultural globalization which was different from how we know it today, but no less pervasive. Even Bernardino Baldi’s poetical treaty La Nautica, displayed in the exhibition, tells of distant ways of transmitting scientific knowledge derived from early modern oceanic sailings.

Among the exhibition’s purposes was the desire to showcase the documentary and bibliographic heritage of the local Maldotti Library, from which all the iconographic and book material on display comes. This institution represents a still too little-explored treasure of historical sources of local, but also regional, and even national importance. The mounting of an exhibition on a global theme, a bold choice for a vibrant but small reality such as Guastalla, testifies to the great research potential guarded by local cultural and archival institutions, of which the Maldotti Library has been the centerpiece for more than two hundred years.

Last but not least, it is important to mention the educational value of the exhibition, designed to be visited by schoolchildren of various grades as an interactive and audiovisual moment of learning. In fact, the exhibit features a three-dimensional model of the ship Victoria, the only one to return to Spain in 1522, as well as various wooden reproductions of navigational instruments used by 16th-century navigators, made to be used by visitors. It was also possible to borrow a mobile planetarium from the University of Parma, housed in the rooms of the Ducal Palace, to show visitors the celestial vault of the southern hemisphere as seen by Magellan and his sailors after crossing the equatorial line.

I hope I have achieved the goal of narrating Magellan in one context not directly affected by the tradition of ocean voyages. Have I succeeded? I leave that answer to the exhibition visitors. [David Salomoni]