Language on show

The exhibition area, located inside the reading room, welcomes visitors into a fascinating journey that goes from the first vocal articulations to oral communication, from signs and drawings to alphabetical and digital scripts. If the human being is a 'speaking animal', how important and specific are vocal exchanges as an expression of our body and deepest being? Are poetry and art the primary sources of languages? What steps we have gone through from the prehistoric experience of signs and paintings to the most powerful and riskiest technology of the alphabetical writing? What has changed in the way we express ourselves and communicate, with the growing popularity of the internet and the digital universe? These are just some of the questions that the Department of Humanistic Sciences will answer, stimulating many other questions. Thanks to computer tools and interactive methodology, it will be possible to trace the history of human speech from the theories on the origins of language to the anthropological dimension of oral tradition, from the earliest epigraphic records of ancient area up to the era of the internet.