Italian writer Roberto Saviano, who has been living under police protection since 2006 when his book about the Naples Camorra mafia was published, said his recent work with the Turin Egyptian Museum for the 'Living Places' project meant "liberation".
The project involved nine writers and nine previously unreleased works by them, as well as three museums in which to hear them.
"For me, working with Egyptian history meant, first of all, liberation. Liberation from the present. Imagining ancient history with its very concrete elements was like astral travel, where the body stays in the present time and all the rest - sensations, feelings and not simply the imagination - journeys, comes back," Saviano said in his written text for the project.
Saviano's voice accompanies visitors to the Egyptian Museum of Turin, the most ancient, dedicated to the civilisation that developed along the Nile River.
The other two museums, both in the city of Chambéry, are the Musée des Beaux-arts and Les Charmettes, Maison de Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
"I've always been interested in the way in which, in every society, a few factors can determine the grammar of the entire existence and decide directions, dynamics, conflicts, and in some way, the future," Saviano said.
"For ancient Egypt, the determining factor was the Nile. The Nile each year had a great influence on the size of the harvest, and therefore, on the amount of work, on the amount of pay, on the quality of life. And on social dynamics, such as the worker strike at Deir El-Medina, the first documented strike in history, the episode from which my story begins and takes shape," he said.
Saviano, author of the aforementioned non-fiction book "Gomorrah" as well as the non-fiction "La Paranza dei Bambini" (Gangs of Children), said his idea was "to allow the characters to live and speak through the objects in the museum".
"Objects are like witnesses, representatives of the past that have come down to us, to tell us their version of the facts.
Looking at them, touching them, interacting with them, one can relive an authentic experience, similar to what their owners must have felt thousands of years ago. And the museum becomes like an LSD trip because it makes you lose track of place, it makes you go beyond the barriers of your time and your body, it invites you to mix yourself into the stories that you're hearing, and by hearing them, to live them. When you enter a museum you don't leave only enriched, but deeply changed," Saviano said.
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