The Museo del Camminare (Museum of Walking), Venice, is located in the streets (calli) and squares (campi) of Venice, the largest and oldest pedestrian city in the world. It is from this outstanding open-air workshop that the museum aims to understand the ‘art of Walking’ (H. D. Thoreau), by enhancing and protecting its cultural meanings and asserting its fundamental human value at national and international level.

The Museo del Camminare is non-commercial and aims to investigate and promote walking as a cultural, aesthetic, poetic, and political practice. Through research and exhibitions, the Museum intends to explore the modalities of walking – from stroll to collective march – in their social and gender articulations and in their interactions with the knowledge of the self and the world; environment protection; appropriation of public spaces; artistic practices; social interaction and integration; and political claims. The museum also intends to study and document walking as a libertarian and liberating practice that, by its nature, is opposed to privatisation of spaces and commercialisation of movement.

Cover image: Étienne-Jules Marey, chronophotography, 1884, graphic elaboration.