Welcome to the Joe Petrosino Museum, a narrative musem made of history, memory, and human values that we wish to preserve and pass on to future generations.
In this effort, we are concerned with the fighting against the Mafia. To serve this cause we have set up a museum that is generating emotions, which lead to empathy, knowledge, and side taking in favor of legality.
The Joe Petrosino Museum is not a dusty place with silent objects, it's digital,- just like the Mafia that no longer has the image of a shepherd who wants to steal a sheep, it's digital as well. So digital must be the fight against the Mafia.
But who was Joe Petrosino?
A hero in Italy and America, he is lesser known in the rest of the world.
An Italian immigrant who has become detective in the NY Police, spending all his life investigating and combatting the organized crime.
An Italian immigrant who has become detective in the NY Police, spending all his life investigating and combatting the organized crime.
In the Joe Petrosino Museum visitors can explore the history of Mafia and Anti-mafia through audiovisual narratives and can access digital video documents using panels like this.
Everything set in such a way to give new meaning, new uses and new purpose to the archives of the Digital Library of the Italian Broadcast Corporation.
Little Italy
Little Italy was his district where he lived and where he worked. For the film that guides visitors in the museum we reconstructed it. Some parts are 3D modeling, others pencil drawing.
Our Little Italy is not the environment for the policeman Joe, but the realm of his ideas and values! I want the audience to perceive the representation of a drama and not simply the biography of a man.
So, fruit baskets of this bakery are real, the city is reconstructed, bread is partly real and partly drawn, the sparks of the fire, the flour dust on the hands of the baker are computer graphics.
The people, who populate the streets, are citizens from Padula, brought on set deliberately.
Fellow citizens of Joe Petrosino, to strengthen the collective identity around the local history and culture.
Fellow citizens of Joe Petrosino, to strengthen the collective identity around the local history and culture.
This digital video is a stack of over 40 highly complicated layers. I'm not talking about techniques or technology though. I am striving to achieve the maximum emotional impact for my visitors through the use of a meaningful digital language. A digital language, which can transform the experience of my young visitors at the Museum into knowledge and side taking and therefore impact their daily behavior.
It means generate culture, digital culture!
Digital for me means highly articulate image processing. The video composition is like a collage, like the canvas of a painter who assembles what inspired him using his imagination as a glue and fantasy as a fuel.
In the last room, on a touch screen table, all the clips produced can be reordered and used as original sources by any teacher to build her or his lecture.
Along the way there are posters like these that contain quotations taken from literature. We used the magnifying glass of the great authors, because we wanted a vision out of the reality, but close to the truth.
In the Joe Petrosino Museum art and science coexist giving us a different point of view than just the reality.
Four bullets, shot from behind, killed Joe on
March 12th 1909
As free men, we feel the duty to remember his values of
Italian, Migrant, Policeman, American, Hero.