Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities

Menu ↓
You are in: Home / Structure

What is the role of the Polo Museale della Puglia? How is it organized and which museums does it manage?

Mission

The Polo Museale della Puglia (Puglia’s Museum Hub), a peripheral organisation of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, operates at regional level with the aim of promoting and making available to the public museums, monuments and publicly managed archaeological areas.

An organ of the Direzione Generale Musei (General Museum Directorate), the Hub promotes the constant relations between local and state organisations, and among various public and private museums in the region, fostering the creation of the regional museum system and ensuring the quality of organic cultural offerings. The Hub works to define the strategies and common objectives to promote and foster the integration of channels to access culture.

Encourages the active participation of communities, supporting projects to raise awareness and raise funds to support our cultural heritage.

Functions

What does the Museum Complex do

  • 01 It leads and coordinates state museums belonging to the region

    It organizes the activities of managing, enhancing, communicating and promoting the regional museum system, in strict contact with the coordinating museum directors.

  • 02 It enhances the cultural heritage

    It sets common valuation strategies and goals for the widest use of cultural heritage and the creation of integrated museum services.

  • 03 It assures high quality service standards

    It assures high quality standards for museums of its own competence with regards to management and communication as well as educational and technological innovation.

  • 04 It concludes agreements to enhance landscape assets

    It collaborates with the State and the local authorities for the definition of cultural territorial programs and strategic plans for cultural development.

  • 05 It promotes cultural itineraries

    It works with local authorities and institutions to integrate routes and services in tourist-cultural itineraries.

  • 06 It encourages active participation

    It promotes and manages awareness-raising projects and public fundraising campaigns to support cultural heritage.

Director

Mariastella Margozzi
Director

+39 080 5285210

Entered MIBAC after winning a competition in 1988 as a specialist art historian, based in the Superintendency of Caserta and Benevento at the Royal Palace of Caserta, where she worked on the 18th and 19th century sculpture collections. In 1993 she moved to Rome, her birthplace, to the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, where until 2004 she directed the Restoration Laboratory. Here she planned and directed restoration projects for many contemporary works of art, as well as for all the decorative elements inside and outside the building designed by Cesare Bazzani in 1911 as the National Gallery’s home. From 2004 to 2015 she was director of the Boncompagni Ludovisi Museum for Decorative Arts, Costume and Fashion. Here she developed and implemented the Museum’s museographic and museological project, and also directed all restoration work on furnishings, works of art and clothing. As a senior staff member with the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, from1993 to 2016 she was in charge of the collections of 20th century painting and sculpture.

She focused in particular on Italian and foreign artists and themes, especially from the first half of the 20th century (Futurism, Novecento, Abstractionism and Realism) and the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s (Kinetic Art, Arte Povera). During her career, she has planned and organised many important exhibitions in Italy and in numerous other countries, in some of which she participated in seminars and conferences on contemporary art. Her studies have also focused on the history of the National Gallery itself, making her a major expert on Palma Bucarelli, legendary director of the National Gallery responsible for many important institutional choices regarding Italian contemporary art. From 2016 to the end of 2017, as a senior art historian, she directed the Preservation department at the Service III of the Directorate General of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape at MIBAC. She also collaborated with the Museum of Civilisation in curating the exhibition of sculpture and graphic collections from the former Italian Institute for Africa and the Orient, which she had once directed. She has been a technical consultant for numerous Italian Police Departments as an expert in identifying false attributions to important 20th century artists, including Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso.

In January 2018 the Director General of Museums appointed her director of the Bari-based Puglia Museum Hub, after her participation in a public eligibility competition for MIBAC directorial roles.

Staff

Offices

Administrative and General Affairs Offices

Ensures support to the Hub Director in his institutional duties, coordinating activities with other offices.

Licensing Office

Handles the licensing of instrumental and temporary use and reproduction of cultural assets loaned to the Museum Hub.

Press and Communication Office

Coordinates relations with information media and manages aspects of institutional communication for the Museum Hub.

Conventions Office

Coordinates agreements and conventions with public and private parties within the promotion activities of the Museum Hub.

Inventory and Cataloguing Office

Handles the inventory and scientific cataloguing of assets of cultural interest overseen by the Museum Hub, in conjunction with the ICCD.

Educational Services Office

Collaborates with school institutions, universities and sociocultural associations to devise teaching programmes and sign agreements, with reference to stages and internships and checks their implementation.

General Archives

Oversees the storage of documents and records at the Museum Hub and institutes within its area of competence.

Photographic Archives

Produces photographic records used to document and catalogue the cultural assets of the Hub. Manages the storage and archives of the photographic records.

Accounting Office

Coordinates the research of services or assets on the electronic market, manages accounting and payments, initiates and establishes accounting and administrative activities related to financial reporting.

Consignment Office

Takes inventories of consumables and handles related follow-ups.

Technical Office

Ensures the proper operation of the facilities, manages ordinary and extraordinary maintenance, drafts adaptation, restoration, setting up and reopening projects for cultural sites.

Partnering Projects Office

Coordinates relations with partners in projects that involve the Museum Hub.

Public Relations Office

Ensures compliance with transparency and quality standards of services, provides information on the activities of the Hub, ensures the exercise of the right to access documents, and handles complaints, proposals and reports to improve the quality of services.

Personnel Office

Coordinates management of personnel in the Institute and in the Museums that are part of the Hub, in collaboration with individual Museum directors and with the Director of the Museum Hub.

IT Office

Coordinates the management of IT systems and the organisation of related operation protocols.

Ticketing Office – SYSTAN

Enters visitors’ information in the digital SYSTAN system.

 

Museums

Territory

Index

Landscape means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors Il termine Paesaggio designa una determinata parte di territorio, così com’è percepita dalle popolazioni, il cui carattere deriva dall’azione di fattori naturali e/o umani e dalle loro interrelazioni. (Convenzione Europea del Paesaggio, art. 1 – Firenze 20 ottobre 2000)

OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE

The Puglia region features a variety of landscapes that bear the signs of a history hundreds of millions of years old. Puglia has unusual geographic characteristics, a varied landscape that sets it apart in the country and provide the region with different aspects and shapes, from the northern Tavoliere to the Murgia–from the Latin “murex”, sharp rock–area with its wide karst highland that joins central Puglia and eastern Basilicata, to the Valle d’Itria, between Locorotondo, Cisternino and Martinafranca, and the more than 865 km of coastline between the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic Sea.

A harmony of nature, history and tradition defines this land, gently stretched around the “Mar Piccolo” of the Gulf of Taranto and along the Greek, Croatian and Macedonian Adriatic Sea. Puglia has a story to tell that dates back to the Man of Altamura, a Neanderthal specimen recently discovered in the dolines of Alta Murgia, and beyond. In this region, on the 2nd of August 216 BC, the Carthaginian army, brilliantly led by general Hannibal Barca, surrounded and almost completely annihilated the Roman legions led by consuls Lucius Aemilius Paulus and Gaius Terentius Varro. This is where, two centuries later, Frederic II of Swabia would build the castle widely renowned for its admirably balanced octagonal shape – Castel del Monte – one of the most solid and outstanding examples of fortified architecture, a combination of classic and Renaissance elements with style elements of Oriental culture.

From the district of Capitanata to the southern Salento area, the Puglia Museum Hub–established through a reform introduced by the then minister for heritage and cultural activities and tourism–manages and coordinates all aspects of promoting culture and making it accessible to the public for fifteen extremely diverse cultural sites, including nine museums and three archaeological sites, one art gallery, four castles in Bari, Trani, Copertino (Lecce) and Castel del Monte, near Andria, declared Unesco World Heritage Site in 1996.

Back to the top