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Strolling through the Athens of travellers at the National Archaeological Museum
Athens
44 Patision Street Athens Athens-Centre https://www.myguideathens.com/events/strolling-through-the-athens-of-travellers-at-the-national-archaeological-museum
National Archaeological Museum
The National Archaeological Museum in Athens presents the temporary exhibition entitled “A dream among splendid ruins...Strolling through the Athens of travellers, 17th -19th century”. The exhibition will last from September 8, 2015 to October 8, 2016 The visitors’ companions on this stroll are the European travellers who undertook the ‘Grand Tour’ to the capital city of Hellenism and who, inspired by the movement of Classicism, recorded the ‘splendid ruins’ of its historical past. Twenty-two illustrated travel publications and fourteen original works of art - oil paintings, watercolours, and engravings from the Library collections of the Hellenic Parliament - offer landscapes, images, monuments, and specific moments from the Athens of travellers, feeding the visitors’ imagination and setting starting-points for personal readings. Thirty-five marble sculptures from the National Archaeological Museum, many of them presented here for the first time, converse with the travellers’ works, complementing their charming narrative of the city's monumental topography. The museum experience is supplemented by music from the travellers’ homelands as well as by Greek music such as that recorded by the French composer and music theorist L.A. Bourgault-Ducoudray during his visit to Athens in 1874-1875. The exhibition was organised with the cooperation of the Hellenic Parliament Library. Among 76 exhibits are works from the National Archaeological Museum, the Collection of Artworks and the Library of the Hellenic Parliament. Works of art on loan from the Museum of the City of Athens and the General State Archives of Greece also feature among the exhibits. In 2016, the National Archaeological Museum will celebrate 150 years since its foundation. The new exhibition of the National Archaeological Museum brings out the incipient cultural environment to which the Museum owes its foundation, while the long chronicle of the museum's founding, character, history, and activities, so closely bound with the modern history of Greece, will be unravelled in a series of upcoming events. The first one is now presented in a separate hall adjacent to the exhibition of the Travellers. It is a special visual installation curated by Andonis Theocharis Kioukas. Enriched with music and film projections, the installation makes use of old showcases from the first years of the Museum's operation, subtly making an effort to elucidate the secret thread that connects all those that the National Archaeological Museum carries in its entrails and transports through time functioning as an ark of concepts and universal values. For more info: www.namuseum.gr