Museo tattile - Bologna, Tactile art museum in Bologna, Italy

The Museo tattile Anteros occupies part of the Francesco Cavazza Institute for the Blind in Bologna and holds around sixty three-dimensional translations of paintings, from classical antiquity to contemporary art. These are bas-reliefs of famous pictures, technical reliefs, copies of Renaissance reliefs, and teaching panels on historical style and perspective. The reliefs are designed to be read by hand.

The museum opened in 1999 as a result of research collaboration between several institutions, including the Italian Union for the Blind and the Francesco Cavazza Institute. This partnership established the foundation for making artworks accessible to people with vision loss.

The museum is named Anteros and was created specifically to serve blind and visually impaired visitors through art. The collection demonstrates how famous paintings can be made accessible to everyone by transforming them into objects you can touch and explore.

The museum occupies the palazzo of the Istituto dei ciechi Francesco Cavazza in Bologna. Visits are guided by museum operators, who lead tactile reading of the bas-reliefs; the route follows a chronological, iconographic and stylistic sequence. Groups and schools should arrange their visit in advance with the institute.

The modeling laboratory is not a craft workshop: it is where the museum checks what a visitor has understood. After reading a bas-relief alone and then guiding another person through it, the visitor reshapes the image in clay, and staff use the result to gauge how much of the image was perceived and remembered, refining the teaching tools in turn.