Museo dell'Emigrazione Marchigiana

Beneath Villa Colloredo Mels, in vaulted cellars turned exhibition halls, Recanati remembers the roughly 700,000 people from the Marche who abandoned a land of poverty around the turn of the twentieth century. Touch screens, wall-sized photographs and recorded voices make this the region's most direct encounter with its own diaspora.

Why it matters

The Marche lost an enormous share of its people between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, when extreme poverty pushed entire families towards the Americas and beyond. The Museum of Marche Emigration — MEMA — is the region's purpose-built monument to that departure. Opened in December 2013, it was conceived as a "physical and emotional" interpretation rather than a gallery of objects. It was commissioned by the Comune di Recanati together with the Regione Marche and the Associazione marchigiani nel mondo, the association linking the region to its emigrant communities, with national co-funding. The museum offers a regional resource for descendants of Marchigiani abroad and for the study of hill-town depopulation.

What to notice

The exhibition is organised in four sections: "Le marche e l'emigrazione", "La decisione di partire", "Molti viaggi in uno solo" and "Dal presente al futuro" — the land and its exodus, the choice to leave, the many journeys in one, and the passage from past to future. Multimedia stations and touch screens sit alongside descriptive panels, period photographs and large-format images that scale the migrant experience up to architectural size. The "Memoria viva" collection is an archive of photographs and documents in which emigrants recount their experiences. The museum's associated digital materials have included the Radio Radici podcast, a virtual tour and educational games.

Context and history

Emigration from the Marche was a demographic convulsion: the museum's own figure speaks of circa 700,000 people who left around the turn of the century seeking fortune in unknown destinations, and later waves added to the total. Recanati was chosen as the site because the region wanted a permanent place of memory near the symbolic heart of Marche identity, and the antique cellars of Villa Colloredo Mels offered an appropriately evocative shell — vaulted, cool and underground, like the memory itself. Since opening in December 2013 the museum has become a regional reference for emigration studies and family history. Its cultural programme has included laboratories and educational activities for schools.