The museums world tries to safeguard and communicate the intangible dimension of heritage

The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage signed in 2003 deeply questioned the museum world. It is necessary for the museum to modify certain among its essential functions and its ways of working, since a new challenge urges it. It s not an easy task, since the most spread museum model in the world is the Western one, which is conceived and lived as the reign of of tangibleness: it s not adequate for an intangible collection. In this respect the failure of museum in the colonial era is well known. A deep change in museum structure is required, and a "comparative museology" can help for this aim; the museological attitude is not exclusive of the Western world, and examples of it gathered throughout the world by anthropologists can provide a good model to face difficulties that arise when the museum meets the intangible.The biggest risk the museum encounters is the one of freezing intangible heritage in fixed forms, thus letting it die. For this reason, a good practice of heritage conservation and management should be based on the engagement of the cultural community linked to a landscape or to a cultural expression. Firstly it should be aimed at making the cultural bearers continue to practice and produce their cultural expressions; secondly, the local cultural community should be involved in the process of communication of its heritage. Its correct communication is indeed a fundamental way to permit a right conservation of our heritage s memory and collective identity. Many different good example of it are rising in Italy, as the artistic interventions of Studio Azzurro, among the others, show.