At Home with the Langobards: “Langobard Plots Amongst Architecture and Fabrics”

May 31, 2021 News, Offerte, Visore Home No comments

While touring Italy, the exhibition “Trame longobarde. Tra architettura e tessuti” arrived at the Museo Sannitico in Campobasso where it was inaugurated on Saturday 29 May.

The exhibition-dossier realised by the City of Spoleto in 2013 and financed by Regione Umbria within the project “Musei che hanno stoffa”, with the curatorship of Glenda Giampaoli and Giorgio Flamini, scientific advisor Donatella Scortecci and the collaboration of the school IIS Sansi-Leonardi-Volta, has been enlarged and enriched during these 8 years thanks to the contributions of the Associazione Italia Langobardorum and the Ministry of Culture, L. 77/2006 “Siti UNESCO”.
A good practice for museum education, in its new guise it has been disseminated in almost the entire network of the serial site (Spoleto, Monte Sant’Angelo, Brescia, Benevento, Cividale del Friuli) but also in museums that are not part of it, such as the MANN in Naples and now the Museo Sannitico in Campobasso.

 But what is the link with Molise? Probably not everyone knows that in Campochiaro, in the villages of Vincenne and Morrione, a necropolis with 400 tombs was discovered at the end of the 1970s. The grave goods discovered are on display at the Museo Sannitico in Campobasso. The knights of Campochiaro, buried together with their horses, were equipped with weapons, a belt, shoes and a jar placed at the feet of the deceased. “This territory was part of the Duchy of Benevento and particularly in Campochiaro a large necropolis was discovered with a Bulgarian population that fled Great Bulgaria (which is located between present-day Hungary and Moldavia) because of internal wars and took refuge in Lombardy,” explains archaeologist Davide Delfino. “The king of the Lombards was the Duke of Benevento and he sent them to the Duchy of Benevento where his son (who was in charge of the Duchy) enfeoffed them between Isernia and Sepino to have them as warriors who could defend the Duchy from Byzantine attacks. Generation after generation, these warriors were culturally lost because they mixed with the indigenous Lombard population, becoming Lombards in all respects.
The Polo Museale del Molise is a member of the Associazione Italia Langobardorum, the managing body of the Longobard UNESCO site.

Since its foundation in 2009, the association has always paid particular attention to young people by promoting and financing numerous initiatives, acting as a veritable laboratory of good practices, in which the know-how and experience of the staff of the UNESCO offices in the network become a wealth of shared knowledge.

Starting from a work that has intertwined scientific data and plausible reconstructions, the exhibition-dossier intends to propose an accurate interpretation of ancient weaving techniques through the reconstruction of fabrics, clothes and looms in use between the 6th and 8th centuries AD.

The reconstruction of textiles and clothing, in particular, is the thread that leads us to get to know the Longobard people more closely, starting with the objects and artefacts that were an integral part of daily life.

Half of the garments were woven by hand on horizontal heald looms, reproducing exactly the number of warp and weft threads per cm, as well as the thickness of the threads and the twists. Considering that these fabrics were probably made by women in the domestic sphere, the fabric heights were assumed to be quite small and compatible with the vertical looms, with weights or double looms, used in the reference period. The other half of the garments were made using an industrial cotton cloth to emphasise the fact that the model of the garment shown is the result of scientific contamination and the curators’ elaborations.

Precisely because of its educational value, the exhibition also includes a trunk, a self-supporting teaching room containing all the materials needed for the workshop. The didactic activities proposed with ‘Trame Longobarde’ – homogeneous throughout the network in terms of method and content – have been formulated with the aim of leading the user to discover the customs and traditions of the Langobards, interweaving not only threads, but also stories and knowledge. After a brief introduction on the history, culture and clothing of this people, experienced didactic operators – trained by the same experts of the technical-scientific group of the project – explain how to make a bracelet through the technique of weaving with tablet looms. At the end of the workshop, users will take the bracelet and the weaving kit with them.

At the inauguration, the president of the association Italia Langobardorum, Professor Rossella del Prete, cultural councillor of the Municipality of Benevento, explained the peculiarities of this exhibition-dossier.

After the stop in Molise, the exhibition will arrive in Valtopina to be set up inside the Museum of Embroidery and Textiles. The 19th edition of the Biennial Exhibition of Embroidery and Textiles, which will be held from 3 to 5 September 2021, has in fact indicated the theme “Embroidering Umbria” as “The thread of history: the Lombards in Italy and Umbria”. Participants are invited to interpret the signs of Lombard art with their own textile techniques: from jewellery to weapons, etc.

The exhibition-dossier will then continue its journey to be hosted in Campello sul Clitunno and, by the end of the year, in Castelseprio.
Happy Monday with the Langobards!

NEWS ARCHIVES
Pin It

Related Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *