Top of the World
The Museum is located in the historical centre of Salerno, in via Mercanti 74. It is a museum without barriers also for disabled people, within the Cassio project prepared by MiBACT. The Virtual Museum was born from the transformation and enlargement of the Didactic Museum of the Medical School of Salerno, realized in 1993 by the Superintendence. In the virtual museum, the themes and protagonists of that glorious page which, in the years immediately following the year 1000, saw Salerno at the centre of the scientific renaissance of the West, are brought back to life in an engaging and interactive story. An important hub of cultural and commercial traffic, Salerno, a Longobard capital well rooted in classical culture, reached in scientific elaboration expressions of freedom and cultural openness of international scope. Here, through the study of the authoritative sources of classical and Arabic medicine and through the medical activity practiced and taught by monks and lay people, the scientific knowledge that placed man with his health, his rules and his harmony with nature at the centre of philosophy was defined. The virtual theatre, through a specifically conceived script, underlines its centrality, while symbolically representing the meeting of two distant worlds. A careful research among precious medieval manuscripts, preserved in the most important Italian and European libraries, has provided the rich iconographic set of the narration that winds, flat and usable, between spectacularizations and animated miniatures. Over the years, the small museum became a point of reference for scholars, tourists and the school public who were offered extensive documentation and information through films, light panels, photographic reproductions and reproductions of ancient surgical instruments. Technological innovation made the instruments used inadequate in a short time and it was therefore necessary to design this new exhibition, which makes use of the most advanced information technology and is able to talk in a widespread way both with a generally informed public.
