AMIR, foreign prince visiting Florence

Florence is one of the most important art cities in the world. Every year, millions of tourists flock to its streets and line up to visit some of the world's most important museums, such as the Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti, and the Accademia Museum. Tourists seek to connect with the culture of the Renaissance and the great masters of the past. In a city invaded daily by visitors, a particular project was born in 2018: it is called AMIR, an acronym for Welcome, Museums, Inclusion, and Relationship, but the name in Arabic also means prince. It is a network of museums aimed at offering cultural mediation activities conducted by foreign-born citizens. It involves twenty mediators and eleven museums, collections, villages, churches, and public spaces in Florence and Fiesole.

AMIR is a project by Stazione Utopia and the thematic museum network Musei di Tutti. It involves lesser-known museums such as those in Fiesole (the Museum and Archeological Area of Fiesole, the Museo Bandini, the Museum Primo Conti), as well as famous museums like Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, and the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. In recent years, it has also included the Art Collection of Fondazione CR Firenze, the town of Quaracchi, the town and the Church of Santa Maria in Peretola, Villa Medicea La Petraia, and the Garden of the Villa Medicea di Castello. The project collaborates with the Direzione Regionale Musei of Tuscany and is supported by contributions from the Tuscany Region and the Fondazione CR Firenze.

The overarching aim of this project is to proffer, primarily to residents but also to discerning tourists, an original lens through which to contemplate a city that, without this endeavor, risks descending into a static exhibition of artworks and sculptures, severed from any meaningful discourse with the vivacious urban tapestry. The guides affiliated with AMIR transcend the conventional bounds of their profession; rather than solely contextualizing the locales and artifacts ensconced within museum walls, they enrich the historical narrative of Florence by interweaving their personal journeys and the cultural traditions of their respective homelands. In so doing, they imbue Florence's chronicles with a profound complexity.

The hallmark of this initiative resides in its capacity to imbue Florentine history with fresh perspective, one borne from the diverse backgrounds of the guides hailing from disparate corners of the globe, all bound together by the shared experience of engaging with European history through the prism of colonialism. Confronted by the deleterious impact of Western influence on their own heritage back home, AMIR's guides find in Florence the opportunity to delve into the intellectual crucible of a continent that, even while it plundered the riches of Asian, African, or Indigenous American civilizations and too often obliterated their customs, concurrently fostered the creation of masterpieces during an era now unrecoverable.

However, it is crucial to underscore that their perspective is far from a purely decolonial or entrenched in the tradition of Subcultural Studies, as it eschews an anthropological approach to their countries of origin. Instead, it reimagines Western culture as an epiphany, rather than an immutable axiological platform. The cultural relativism inherently espoused by AMIR's guides thus mirrors the intellectual currents inaugurated by Montaigne in seventeenth-century Europe. The culture they strive to uncover is that of the West, and Florence stands as an exceptionally felicitous and emblematic exemplar of this cultural tapestry.

Through the prism of their own cultural backgrounds, these guides introspectively revisit historical phenomena like slavery or ideological constructs such as homophobia, casting a discerning eye upon the notion of the so-called "cradle of civilization." Their objective is to elucidate how distant societies, geographically removed, managed to proffer alternative paradigms, often distinguished by a more pronounced ethos of inclusivity. In effect, AMIR broadens the purview of the Western audience, compelling it to undergo a process of intellectual estrangement, as it is compelled to reevaluate the inherent discriminatory aspects of the concept of "civilization," a moniker to which the West has long laid claim. AMIR thus engenders a distinctive narrative tapestry, one that approaches the cultural heritage with a bold, audacious freedom of interpretation, all the while maintaining a profound sense of respect and fascination.