First Edition, DAY 8 - A museum for cultures?

The last full-day of our summer school took place in an expceptional location in the heart of the historical city of Mdina: Palazzo Falson. It is a wonderful two-storey medieval palace fashioned on Sicilian examples of its period and hosts a huge collections of memorabilia belonged to Capt Olof Frederick Gollcher (1889-1962), the son of a prosperous shipping merchant of Swedish descent: Gollcher was an artist, scholar and philanthropist, but also a discerning collector of objets d’art and historical objects.  We visited the house-museum and got ready for the morning session of our programme: the Migrantour workshop.


In his introduction to the workshop, Francesco Vietti argued as cultural diversity related to global migration is a key element of tourism attractiveness through which many cities have managed to transform their multi-ethnic neighborhoods into places of leisure and consumption. This kind of urban tourism has often been portrayed in negative terms: many authors underlined how the process of gentrification excludes migrants from the economic and social benefits brought by tourism, while at the same time the reification of ethnic differences represents their cultural heritage in an exotic and over-simplistic way. 
Going beyond the interpretative level and embracing an applicative perspective, could anthropologists play a significant role in making the encounter between tourists and migrants within the cities less problematic? Vietti tried to answer this question discussing the results of a project that he has been coordinating for a decade: Migrantour is European network of 16 cities, started in 2009 and still going on, which has developed an innovative kind of “intercultural urban walking tour” designed and led by first and second-generation migrants. Therefore, responsible tourism is assumed as an ethical approach to envision a collaborative way to valorize the contribution that generations of migrants have made to the history of European cities.


During the workshop we experienced some of the tools developed by the Migrantour training course in order to design the intercultural itineraries within the cities of the network, e.g. the "mental mapping" of the places related to migration and mobility.
In the afternoon, the Phd students attending our summer school had the chance to present their ongoing researches to colleagues and lecturers. Gaspare Messana, Giulia Usai, Alessandra Turchetti and Edoardo Occa brought us in a quick journey through themes, metodologies and fields, from hospitaly in Sardinia to cotemporary art Morocco, from health care in Tanzania to poetry in the Mediterranean. Finally, Rachel Radmilli, from the University of Malta, outlined her own research about the wine sector in Malta. Our lecturers were really impressed by the high level of their presentations!