The documentary exhibition ‘Tra due mondi: memoria e celebrazione di Antonio Raimondi in Italia e in Perù’ (Between Two Worlds: Memory and Celebration of Antonio Raimondi in Italy and Peru) was inaugurated at the Italian Cultural Institute in Lima. The exhibition encompasses two bicentenaries, the birth of Antonio Raimondi on 19 September 1824 and the independence of Peru, made definitive with the Battle of Ayacucho on 9 December 1824. These dates, 19 September and 9 December, also symbolically mark the opening and closing of the exhibition.
The project united the Italian Embassy in Lima, the Italian Cultural Institute and the Analysis, Programming, Statistics and Historical Documentation Unit of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI). The strategic alliance with the Associazione Educativa Antonio Raimondi (AEAR), promoter of the Raimondi Museum, as well as managing body of the two Italian schools in Peru, has made it possible to create a new narrative of the figure of Antonio Raimondi, unravelled through a dialogue between archives. An original plot of the history of the man, the naturalist and the scientist ‘between two worlds’ is thus revealed.
Raimondi was the most important figure in the history of natural sciences in Peru in the 19th century, thanks to the support that the Peruvian State gave to his research work. Isabella Proia, from MAECI, who collaborated in the curatorship of the exhibition with Luis Felipe Villacorta, Director of the Raimondi Museum, explained: “The sections of the exhibition recount his love for Peru and his relations with Italian institutions, through which Italy got to know the then mysterious Peru.”
Italian and Peruvian institutions contributed to the exhibition, including the General Archives of the Nation, the National Library of Peru, the Central Reserve Bank of Peru, the Lima Museum of Art, as well as – for Italy – three museums in Milan (Museo del Castello Sforzesco, Museo delle Culture del Mondo, Museo di Storia Naturale), the Italian Geographic Society, the State Archives of Rome and the State Archives of Genoa.
