Museo Rodari — Una fantastica storia

Omegna gave Italian childhood its greatest storyteller, and the Rodari Museum returns the gift: an interactive, multimedia museum where visitors switch on the stories themselves. Housed in a renovated early-nineteenth-century building near Rodari's birthplace, it treats fantasy as something you do, not something you look at.

Why it matters

Gianni Rodari is widely called the father of modern Italian children's literature, and Omegna is his city — its streets, its canal and its landscape fed his imagination. The museum is described as the first institution wholly devoted to his work, and it takes an unusual stance: it displays no objects behind glass, but stories and experiences that only activate when visitors participate. For families travelling around Lake Orta it is a museum designed, from the ground up, for children without excluding adults.

What to notice

• The museum's premise, stated in its own material: exhibits combine physical elements with digital video projections, mechanical components and procedural software, so visitors set the narratives in motion themselves — without them, the museum stays deliberately incomplete.
• A television interview with Rodari, replayed as part of the narrative path.
• The telephone fables, which evoke the author's "Fairy Tale Telephone" through tales in different languages.
• The opening room's architectural allusions: an arcaded doorway recalling Omegna's built fabric, and a projection of the Nigoglia canal flowing upwards, echoing Rodari's famous image of the canal that runs uphill while the lake stays still.
• The visual identity based on Rodari's two-coloured "teacher's pencil" — red and blue — designed by Studio Grand Hotel, turning the mark of error into what the museum calls the sceptre of creative error.

Context and history

The museum was created in a municipally owned building in the historic core of Omegna, a few steps from the town hall and from the writer's birthplace, so that a visit to the museum leads naturally into a walk through Rodari's city. Opened in 2021, a century after the writer's birth in the town, it gives Omegna a civic shrine proportionate to its author. The fabric itself dates to the first years of the nineteenth century and was entirely renovated to create step-free, obstacle-free spaces suited to museum use.

The narrative path, "Una fantastica storia" (a fantastic story), recounts the writer, his territory and his historical context through the lightness of virtual media; the project was realised with public support including co-financing from the Fondazione Cariplo, and the scholarly direction has been associated with Pino Boero, a scholar of children's literature. The museum is part of Omegna's wider cultural legacy associated with Rodari, including the festival and Parco della Fantasia.