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The historical memory of a community whose path is accompanied by the presence of the Giara horse, like a shadow that follows it without abandoning it, defining its contours and marking its path. The section on the Giara horse describes the origins, habitat and characteristics of the animal.

With the aim of engaging even the youngest children, the interviews and contents of the Museum of the Little Horse of the Giara passed into the hands of a great artist, illustrator Pia Valentinis, who after analyzing the collected material transferred it into illustrations. Paintings that strengthen the museum exhibition with the ambitious goal of being able to reach different sensibilities. The illustrations themselves, with captions taken from the interviews, make up an original guide book for visiting the museum.

Pia valentinis’s illustrations, about forty in number, can be found throughout the museum’s rooms and are an integral part of the museum layout. The illustrations, both colored and black and white, were created by artist Pia valentinis in about a year and tell the story of the museum’s contents in a completely original way.

The Cavallino della Giara Museum is among the many museums in Sardinia and Italy with an ethnographic itinerary, which is why we wanted to create a different itinerary. A museum layout that would address the topics and objects of a scientific and ethnographic museum through the drawings a great artist.

Original illustrations by Pia Valentinis can be viewed by reservation.

Biography Pia Valentinis:
Pia Valentinis won the XXXI edition of the Andersen Prize, Italy’s largest award dedicated to children’s books, in the Best Illustrator category. The book “Telling Trees,” illustrated together with Mauro Evangelista, won the 2012 Andersen Award for Best Popular Book. He has illustrated numerous children’s books with national and international publishers. His most recent book, “Ferriera” (Coconino Press) is a graphic novel.

The work of updating the museum included about thirty interviews with local people who had lived through the war years. The Genoese were invited to participate, and the response was important and active, as always.
In the interviews, an objective picture was collected, avoiding influencing the interviewee with overly specific questions, and an attempt was made to document the sharpest memories. This method has limitations, as one often cannot go into the details of the topics unless the interviewee does it himself. The result is, however, absolutely sincere. The basis of the working method is the microstory system, we learned from Grendi how, “Social microanalysis binds more to the basic character of the data taken into consideration than to the size of the social area as such.” But
what reinforced the idea is the experimental character, as pointed out by Levi: “The real problem is the experimental choice of scale size in observation. The possibility of a microscopic observation showing us things that had not been observed before is the unifying character of microscopic research.”
This premise gives strength to the project. The narrating microstories are linked to the territory without ever splitting from the context but giving an additional documentary insight that imposes on us, out of documentary duty, an alternative exhibition museum system.
The interviews divided into mini-videos, as concise as they are representative, are linked to the museum visit through Qr-codes that link back to the videos where it is the local people who tell situations, anecdotes, objects and stories.