475 Built Heritage 2013 Monitoring Conservation Management An application of memory studies to museology: the case of Pina- coteca Ambrosiana between the 1960s and the 1990s Silvia Colombo PhD candidate in Conservation of Architectural Heritage, Politecnico di Mila- no, DAStU, Milan, Italy 1. The museum as a reflection of spatial memory When we talk about museums we refer to a particular category of cultural heritage which is considered in its double nature: from one side they are hi- storical buildings and from the other places for exhibition - both permanent and temporary. Actually if museums periodically need interventions of conservation and main- tenance, they also provide, in turn, conservation to the owned collections. Thus their changes happened throughout the years are made to preserve the building itself, but also to rearrange internal spaces: ‘actions’ that we usually see maybe without considering the significances ‘hidden’ behind them. According to the definition given by G.J. Ashworth “buildings and sites are especially visible, potent, robust and accessible expressions of pasts” [Ashworth, 2011, 1] and, as a consequence, expressions of human being and his culture in a certain lapse of time. For example, every room designed for exhibitions is not only a ‘tridimensional container’, but it is a place where we can read between the lines, a space with a message for each visitor: behind every apparently accidental detail there is a conscious decision taken by someone in charge. As we can see, when history meets architecture and art, the result is a subtext made of different layers of meaning. In other words, we create a new identity, that is “fluid, subjective and multi-dimensional, our sense of place and belon- ging in the world centres not only on the ways we may (or may not) express our national or cultural identities and affiliations, but is also concerned with expressing and working out a range of other cultural, social and political expe- riences” [Smith, 2008, p. 160]. We have the possibility to reconnect this iden- tity to the present situation studying historical documents, with the support of the memory studies 1 . Actually, quoting Laurajane Smith “linking memories to objects, or giving them a tangible reality through heritage, means that they can be collected, preserved, lost, destroyed or restored” [Smith, 2006, 61]. So, what are the things (in terms of arrangement, spatial distribution, museum itinerary) to preserve and, on the contrary, what we need to discard? We have to consider that every decision made by the directors, the museum administration… is a link between the past and the present and is - almost partially - influenced by our memory, or by our will to forget. In conclusion, the museum is a kind of text, a “text-related space”, following the definition written by Susan A. Crane [Crane, 2000, 18]: we can understand its traces only paying attention to its spaces and, of course, knowing its history. 2. A case study: the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan 2.1. A short introduction In this essay, more specifically, a peculiar case study will be considered: the