MUST — Archaeology as a Modern Civic Project
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Transcript
The Museo Storico della Città di Lecce—usually shortened to MUST—represents a modern layer of the city’s relationship with its past. Rather than treating heritage as a collection of isolated monuments, the museum links archaeology, art and changing urban culture.
That matters in Lecce because excavation constantly complicates the image of a purely Baroque city. Roman structures, medieval material and later rebuilding overlap beneath the same blocks. A civic museum can put those fragments back into sequence.
For locals, the museum also raises a useful question: when tourism becomes strongly associated with one visual brand—here, Baroque stonework—what histories risk becoming background? Museums are one place where a city can deliberately widen its own story.