For more than twenty years, the Museum has offered guided tours to coincide with Salina’s tourist season, from May to October, with a fixed daily schedule but also by appointment. It has an attendance of about 400 visitors per year.

 

Every museum is a place of memory, but that of emigration is perhaps even more so. It provides an opportunity to remember how we were, reflect on the past and also understand the migrations of the present. In Malfa, on the island of Salina, the Aeolian Museum of Emigration was founded in 1999. Formerly located in the 19th-century Palazzo Marchetti, since 2010 it has been based on Fontana Street, behind the church of San Lorenzo. It is characterized by a narrative path capable of reading the migration experience with a before and after in relation to the departure event. It tells about the journey of life, the one that takes you out of the comfort zone of family ties in search of dignity to escape from misery. Adios, hopes, sufferings, joys, nostalgia, integration, defeats, successes, redemption. The museum describes all these emotions of life by recalling the transoceanic emigration of Aeolians who, between the 19th and 20th centuries, dramatically left the archipelago to seek their fortunes in Australia, Argentina, Brazil, the United States and Canada. These were the great destinations Aeolians looked to after the phylloxera disaster, but always with the image of their island in their hearts. The late nineteenth century is a very important historical period for large waves of migration. People would leave for a variety of reasons, set sail to distant and foreign lands gambling it all in search of a place in the sun. The Aeolian Museum of Emigration, one of the first in Italy, was created thanks to C.I.R.C.E. (International Research Center for Aeolian History and Culture) and the intense activity of Professor Marcello Saija, numerous other university professors, researchers from various national and international universities, associations, organizations and institutions. C.I.R.C.E. runs the museum with the intention of bringing to light the historical memory of compatriots abroad, supporting through the museum reality all forms of cultural exchange. The arrangement follows a chronological criterion and allows for a 360-degree reading of the migration experience. Exposes what has been generously donated by islanders and Aeolian communities about the migration experience.

A rich collection of original objects and papers, documents on the pumice crisis, 1132 letters, documentaries, photographs, weathered yellowed clothes, suitcases, diaries, newspapers, tickets, passports, valuable materials on the life of Aeolian mutual aid societies in America and Australia, from 1898 onward; news and documents on remittances and donations for the restoration of Aeolian churches and the execution of important public works, and much more. All these testimonies represent the memory of the massive emigrations and tell future generations an important piece of the history of Aeolians in the world, a sad page that still unfortunately repeats itself today with other faces, other names, other children, other ports of departure and other destinations, but which speaks the same language, that of the search for happiness. In the Aeolian Islands and particularly in Salina, it all began in 1889, when several vineyards were left without buds because they were hit by a small aphid that destroyed the monoculture of vines that had made the island prosperous. All wiped out, the parasite had left no escape, thus decreeing the end of that malvasia market-based economy. Thus was born the need to set sail for the American dream in the hope of a better future for their children. A painful experience for those in the “land of dreams” who were defined by Americans as “not overtly Negro.”