A Night at the Museo

Our second stop was on the great grid Craft, one of Opensim's oldest grids. We visited the MdM, with owner Rosanna Galvani.
 Rosanna Galvani: The Metaverse Museum (Museo del Metaverso) is a virtual institution that replicates a real museum, featuring exclusive content and collections designed specifically for the Metaverse environment. It combines elements of virtual reality, interactivity and global accessibility, offering virtual exhibitions, art galleries, digital replicas of artworks and cultural objects, learning labs, event spaces and more.

Rosanna Galvani: The Metaverse Museum project was created in Second Life for the enhancement of the artwork present in that virtual world. It was founded on December 5, 2007.

 Over the years the Museo del Metaverso has been quite successful, creating permanent and temporary exhibitions. The Museum has participated in many valuable art/cultural events in the physical world, has helped many students of Fine Arts Academies who were coming to Second Life to make their theses and has collaborated with the Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata, participating in several meetings, with the aim of presenting the project of the Metaverse Museum, which was very innovative for those years.

Rosanna Galvani: Today the main Museum resides in Craft-world (a virtual world based on OpenSimulator) and preserves and exhibits purely digital works, i.e., works made on computers, replicas of works made in the physical world, and most recently also images generated by programs using Artificial Intelligence. It continues to work on different platforms, Second Life, Craft-world and Spatial, organizing exhibitions , lectures and discussions. 

Tosha Tyran: but tell me Rosanna, what was the reason to transfer the Museum to Opensim/Craft?

Phigitting at the MdM

 Light and compact, brightly colored, with three prongs in play, and never still for a moment... the buzzword 'phygital' put fidget spinners into my mind ...oh, the naughties! 'Phygital' is a portmanteau term used to describe, until someone thinks of a less clunky term (and please do!), the fusing of activities going on at the same time in the physical world and on digital platforms. 

Come to think of it though, the Museo del Metaverso is compact, brightly colored, with three prongs in play - it's active in Craft grid in Opensim, and Spatial, a corporate-facing immersive VR platform, and in Second Life. 

Judging by the past year's activities at the Museo del Metaverso, called MdM for short, its founder Rosanna Galvani has been spinning up a huge success story with art shows, workshops, exhibitions, presentations, and conversations that bring together the realities in a masterclass of organization and commitment to education and art. 

Seen here at the Museo, dressed in dark business slacks with her signature top hat, Rosanna cuts a typically modern Italian figure of elegance with a touch of whimsicality that lifts the mood. The HG Address of the MdM is of course at the end of the post, where it belongs.

Rosanna Galvani

Rosanna Galvani: 2025 was both a fruitful and transitional year for us. My vision for virtual worlds is that they should be more than just a "niche" space but that they should take on greater cultural density: artists, curatorial projects, transmedia collaborations—all of this is growing. Over the past year, the Museo del Metaverso has become more 'phygital' with a range of voices and languages and different events. These include digital clothing, 3D installations, and live discussions between participants in real and virtual worlds.