«Fairy tales are true», wrote Italo Calvino in 1956, introducing his collection of Italian folktales. True not because they are historical documents, but because they reveal the bond between daily life and the symbolic dimension. This statement encapsulates the conceptual framework of the exhibition Le fiabe sono vere… Storia popolare italiana (Fairy Tales Are True… Italian Popular History), on view at MUCIV – Museum of Civilizations (Rome) until March 1, 2026.
Curated by Massimo Osanna and Andrea Viliani with a multidisciplinary team and an installation designed by Formafantasma, the exhibition brings together more than five hundred works: garments, masks, amulets, tools of labor and music, photographs, and films. These are not mere artifacts, but witnesses of the relationships between people, communities, and natural environments, assembled into a narrative shaped like a fairy tale. Each section is conceived as a threshold and a passage, evoking the themes of journey, ritual, and transformation.
The project strikingly combines ethnography and design. Ethnography provides the material – the museum’s collections of folk arts and traditions – while design becomes the means of making it legible and shareable. As in the video room, where the audience sits on woven straw chairs (rooted in popular tradition) alongside Mezzadro stools (Zanotta), in which Achille Castiglioni reinterprets Italy’s rural heritage. This detail reflects the approach of Formafantasma, the studio founded by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, renowned for its analytical method toward materials and the stories they embody. Entrusting them with the installation establishes a bridge between popular memory and contemporary design practice, reaffirming material culture as an ongoing field of research.
The exhibition also unfolds as a museographic experiment, where anthropology, pedagogy, and design engage with the theme of accessibility. The entire path has been developed through physical, sensory, cognitive, and symbolic tools, in collaboration with associations and community groups. Each section thus becomes not only an exhibition space, but also a shared laboratory.
With Fairy Tales Are True…, the Museum of Civilizations presents Italian popular heritage as a living and relevant resource. The ethnographic collections, assembled over more than a century of research, are not displayed as testimonies of a closed past, but as materials still capable of questioning the present and suggesting perspectives for the future.
Photo credits: Alberto Novelli, courtesy MUCIV-Museo delle Civiltà, Rome
