The overview of historical house museums in Brazil is an important indicator of different cultural realities in the national territory, featuring several choices and immortalizing heroes and personalities in each region.
This typology of museums involves the transformation and requalification of houses that were inhabited by outstanding figures for the memory of local societies, in museums, places including townhouses, mansions, palaces, simple houses and farms, and whose interest is the building and its inhabitants, besides its collections.
House museums provide a unique view of the intimacy of human life by connecting human relations with the lived spaces and their artistic-cultural collections. Thus, such museums offer the possibility to reflect on facts, feelings and stories that link the spirit of the place, of its characters – famous or anonymous – and of its time. They are museums made up of life narratives.
In 2013, the Artistic-Cultural Collection of the Governmental Palaces of the State of São Paulo published the first mapping of Brazilian museums in this category. In 2021, 8 years later, this mapping upgrade is not only necessary to understand the changes of the period, but also the inclusion of new historical house museums.
In this new proposal, the participation of all the museums included on the map as well as those we have not been able to access yet, is essential.
They are separated by the time when their buildings were built, according to the historical periods: Colony, Empire and Republic. At first, the house museums of Colonial Brazil are mapped but new periods will be published shortly.
With this map, we hope to keep identifying the historical house museums in Brazil, once it allows greater visibility and accessibility to these places, which hold so much of the country's memory. It can also provide new ways of looking on our history and our culture.
