Founded at Paestum in 1993 by the painter Pietro Lista, a museum built not on finished works but on sketches, scribbles and notes — the «minimum materials» Gillo Dorfles defined in 1982.
At a glance
- Type
- Contemporary art museum
- Where
- Paestum, Capaccio Paestum, Province of Salerno, Campania, Italy
- Coordinates
- 40.4214561° N, 15.0117713° E
- Founded
- 1993, by the painter Pietro Lista
- Manifesto
- Il ritorno della pausa, Gillo Dorfles, TAIDE no. 4, 1982
Overview
The MMMAC — Museo Materiali Minimi d’Arte Contemporanea — was founded at Paestum in 1993 on the initiative of the painter Pietro Lista, in the comune of Capaccio Paestum, in the Province of Salerno. It inherits the experience of the Taide gallery, which drove the artistic and cultural debate at Salerno through the 1970s and 1980s.
Its aim is to spread contemporary art through exhibitions, meetings and publications, starting from Paestum itself, with its temples, the layers of its ancient building and its landscape: Paestum as a source for artists, and contemporary art as a new reason to come.
History
The museum is built on a collection of minimum materials by artists of reputation — what Gillo Dorfles defined as sketches, scribbles, notes and small preparatory drawings.
In 1982, in issue 4 of the review TAIDE, Dorfles published a text titled Il ritorno della pausa that became the museum’s manifesto. In it he argued that the minimum material — the sketch, the rough, the unfinished, the embryonic — can become the true matrix of something more, and perhaps better, than the Opus Magnum: that the leavings a writer tears from his poem, the small arabesques a painter covers with later coats, the second thoughts destined for the wastepaper basket, are often the only germinal intuitions from which authentic work can start.
What you see
Small works on paper and preparatory material rather than finished pieces, shown a few hundred metres from the Greek temples.
Practical information
- Address: Via Porta Sirena, 84047 Capaccio Paestum (SA), Campania.
- Opening times are those of the museum; the archaeological area is a short walk away.
Sources
- Cultural Heritage Online historical archive — original Italian entry (beniculturalionline.it), transposed and corrected 2026.
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