Inside one of Italy’s quietly radical institutions, musicians and educators reshape how we hear — and understand — a nation’s soundscape.
A grand piano at the Museum and Library of Music, in Bologna, Italy. (Photo courtesy of the Museum and Library of Music)
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Abroad, Italian music is often reduced to clichés: opera, love songs and mandolins. While those sounds are part of the country’s cultural fabric, it has a far richer, more complex musical heritage.
“The best-known repertoire, even among enthusiasts — 18th-century concertos, opera, 19th-century symphonism — is just a tiny slice of Italian and Western music production,” said Enrico Tabellini, public program manager at the Museum and Library of Music in Bologna, Italy. “All of that fits into just two of our nine rooms.”
Bologna was named UNESCO Creative City of Music back in 2006 and was one of the first to receive the designation. The city’s long musical tradition was central to the nomination.
“Bologna has always been a city of music. In the 18th century, during the Grand Tour, it was one of the essential stops along with Milan, Venice and Naples,” Tabellini said.
The Museum and Library of Music, located in the historic Palazzo Sanguinetti, played a key role in securing that title. “The new museum headquarters opened in 2004. It was one of the main assets of the candidacy, a place that could finally welcome and showcase Bologna’s musical collections.”
But the museum is about more than Antonio Vivaldi. It includes composers and musicians from other regions, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who was from Austria, and German composer Richard Wagner.
“Our exhibition goes up to the early 20th century and reveals a rich panorama of musical forms and genres often unknown to the general public,” Tabellini said. “Wagner, to us, is recent history — rock ‘n’ roll.”
Old music strikes a chord.
Even for music students, the experience can be eye-opening.
“When we guide delegations from conservatories through the museum, we don’t skip the room with Rossini’s autograph manuscript of ‘The Barber of Seville’,” Tabellini said. “But by the time they reach that room, they’ve already encountered many composers, pieces and periods they probably didn’t know. All of this helps dismantle the stereotype of Italian music, even so-called high culture.”
The museum’s collection includes over 300 portraits of musicians — Vivaldi, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi — most of which are searchable online but rarely known to be housed in Bologna. “We are the Facebook of music history,” Tabellini joked. Some visitors come just for a selfie with Vivaldi’s portrait. “But they end up being amazed by everything else too.”
One way the museum connects past and present is by bringing centuries-old traditions into modern classrooms and rehearsal spaces. Ancient manuscripts, Renaissance songs and Baroque instruments become starting points for young people to experiment, perform and imagine their own musical future.
To reach new generations, the museum doesn’t just display music. It puts it in the hands of young people.
“If you bring a 10-year-old into a museum filled with incomprehensible scores and portraits of musicians, you’re basically telling them that music isn’t for them,” Tabellini said.
Connecting to music by playing it
The museum invites students to make music before they study it. Its educational programs include workshops in singing, building instruments, experimenting with electronic music and more.
“Only afterward do they visit the museum, already equipped with experience. That way the visit isn’t punitive but engaging,” Tabellini said. Many of these programs take place directly in schools and involve thousands of children each year.
“You understand music by doing it. That’s our approach — accessible, inclusive, active. The museum visit should be a destination, not a starting point.”
Today, the museum includes over 110,000 volumes — manuscripts, scores, treatises and rare documents. Only a fraction is on display, and much of the experience depends on guided interpretation.
“You need cultural mediation to really understand what you’re looking at,” Tabellini said.
But two decades later, the title’s meaning has changed. “The UNESCO title has generally become a sort of brand, a designer label like those of high fashion,” he said. “It should be an incentive to preserve cultural heritage, but it doesn’t impose any real obligation to do so. It’s now a marketing tool, useful for tourism but not always returning value to the local community.”
Exploring music by creating it
The museum’s collections also hold stories that humanize even the greatest musicians. One of the most memorable involves a 14-year-old prodigy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
In 1770, Mozart stayed in Bologna to study with Giovanni Battista Martini, a Franciscan friar and music theorist who laid the foundation for the city’s historic music archive. Mozart hoped to join the Accademia Filarmonica, but he had to pass a grueling composition exam.
“These exams were called clausura, meaning ‘locked room’,” Tabellini said. “Candidates were literally locked in to write their scores. They could last hours, even days.”
Mozart had spent the summer preparing with Martini, who was also the head of the Accademia. Still, the results were mixed.
“We hold two of the three versions of Mozart’s exam,” Tabellini said. “The first is Mozart’s autograph — full of mistakes. The second, in Martini’s handwriting, is musically correct but full of corrections. The third, kept at the Accademia, is identical to Martini’s version, but written by Mozart. That version earned him admission.”
The conclusion? “Mozart copied,” Tabellini said. “It’s one of the most fascinating musical mysteries we preserve. And telling it to visitors brings history to life. If even Mozart needed a helping hand … then there’s hope for all of us.”
Breathing life into old music
Connecting the old to today also means finding new ways to let historical documents speak to modern audiences. Through live events and storytelling, the museum ensures that ancient music isn’t just studied — it’s experienced in real time.
The museum displays some 300 instruments, including one-of-a-kind rarities like the Clavemusicum omnitonum — a 16th-century “perfect keyboard” capable of playing every pitch imaginable. Unfortunately, its keys are too far apart to be playable by human hands.
Other instruments, however, do come to life in the museum’s many live events: over 100 each year. These include concerts, lectures and series like Wunderkammer and Insolita.
“In Insolita, we select a document from our collection and pair it with a live concert,” Tabellini said.
Before the performance, we show the original manuscript and explain its history. It’s a way to give life to what would otherwise remain silent.”
One audience favorite is “O felici occhi miei” by Arcadelt, a Renaissance madrigal — a form of secular, polyphonic vocal music — with 40 known editions. “We hold 19 of them,” Tabellini said. “When people see the actual pages before hearing the music, they realize that without those sheets, the music itself might never have survived.”
Visitors sometimes wonder why music doesn’t constantly play in a museum of music. But there’s a reason.
“If you just pipe background music through the rooms, it becomes ‘muzak’ — like in a supermarket,” Tabellini said.
Instead, the museum is exploring meaningful ways to integrate sound: virtual manuscripts, interactive instruments and multimedia displays.
“We want to integrate music into the experience — but on our own terms,” Tabellini said. “It’s not just about hearing. It’s about understanding why you’re hearing it.”
The challenge is to make a quiet space sing — not loudly, but purposefully. “We don’t want to entertain. We want to create an experience. Every object we preserve has something to say, and we want its voice to be heard.”
Questions to consider:
1. How do labels like “opera” or “love songs” influence — or distort — how we see Italian music today?
2. In what way is highlighting cultural heritage important to for cities that rely on tourism?
3. When was the last time you found yourself liking old music? What about it did you like?
Francesco Locane is a journalist and author based in Bologna, Italy. He has covered music and culture for newspapers, magazines and digital platforms, and was a long-time host and producer at Radio Città del Capo, one of Italy’s leading independent radio stations. He is also a published writer, with two short story collections and a novel to his name. In addition to podcasting, he creates and hosts live cultural and music-based events, and runs audio storytelling workshops for schools and universities.