The ever-increasing needs for safety and potential and the technological evolution aimed at reducing the cost/benefit ratio have led to the progressive replacement of older systems with more performing ones. This has caused the almost total disappearance of important evidence of the history of this particular transportation sector.
Despite all this, cableway transportation does not yet have its own museum dedicated to its history and technological development. Currently, with the exception of a cableway section of the “Maison des Transports” in Lucerne and a rising cableway museum in Kandersteg, both in Switzerland, a few small rooms within technology museums (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci Museum in Milan ) or dedicated to the mountains in a broader sense (Museo Duca degli Abruzzi in Turin), there is no Museum of Cable Transportation in the strict sense. A structure, possibly consisting of a network of coordinated museum centers, spread across the national territory, capable of making available to scholars, researchers, technical schools and people in general historical finds, photographic material, technical documentation and a monographic library.
According to the definition indicated in the Statute of the International Council of Museums, a museum is “a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment “
A museum dedicated to this topic, which aims to exhibit not only documents, but also construction elements to testify their technological evolution, obviously requires sites bigger than a simple room. In fact, even in the era of virtual reality and multimedia devices, interaction with something physically existing, visible, touchable, is still necessary for a full understanding of the evolutionary phenomenon.
In our opinion it is essential, for a student who intends to direct his professional life in this sector, to have the perception of how much new technologies have simplified and accelerated some processes, especially at the design level (the use of the electronic computer); but also to understand that these must be nothing more than a tool to allow the designer to concentrate more on the aspects that the machine alone cannot evaluate. In this sense it is very important to be able to have an environment suitable for hosting the exposition of construction elements of ski lifts dating back to different eras (technical section) together with contemporary design documents (documentary section) and photographic and multimedia documentation useful to testify to the evolution over time of the various generations of systems (photographic section), as well as a thematic library (bibliographic section) available to scholars, students, and enthusiasts.
“a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment“
(Statute of the International Council of Museums)
