Boot

The Ettore Guatelli Museum is home to a boot once worn by a young farmer – a boot with a patchwork of stories entwined. The boot tells the stories of the countless times it was worn, patched up and mended to accompany the farmer as he laboured in the fields, of the time it was discovered in an attic by a collector who brought it to the Ettore Guatelli Museum, and also of the time it met two photographers from Rome, who shot it for a poster that would see it travel round the world as the poster child for Guatelli’s initiative to set up a museum to house his finds that bear witness to the craftsmanship in rural communities that would let nothing go to waste.

The Ettore Guatelli Museum’s boot opens up many potential avenues of thought to be explored. The first might be for us to look beyond the local, beyond the Emiliana countryside, to the life and work of rural communities throughout Europe and across the globe. Over the course of history, who knows how many boots will be repaired and resoled so that they may reach their potential and tread who knows which roads. And today, ‘the boot’ might also come to symbolise the step it takes to transcend borders, envision a common path and harness the value of freedom.

In the 1950s, Ettore Guatelli began increasingly regular visits to waste collectors’ storerooms in the Apennines, gradually laying the foundations for his future museum. From the mid-1970s, his collection expanded considerably, becoming unintentionally part of a growing trend in the seventies and eighties for the revival and promotion of popular culture. As a result, his establishment became a unique and inimitable demographic, ethnological and anthropological heritage museum of 20th-century Italy.

It was in 1994 that Ettore Guatelli published an essay entitled ‘Waste at the Museum’ in the fifth issue of the periodical ‘Ossimori’. In it, he addressed a highly topical issue, now fast becoming an emergency, stressing the need to reflect on the nature of waste and discarded objects and, more to the point, the recovery and recycling thereof. It is here and even more so in waste disposal that the historic key to genuine ‘democracy’ is to be found.