The philosophy

A museum on the thousand-year-old culture of tattooing is born in Rome.

In a historical period where globalization and new technologies, despite their undeniable benefits for humanity, are gradually distancing us from the true meaning of many things we do and experience, and have experienced, making us barren, not so much those of us from a slightly older generation, but rather the younger ones or future digital natives; we felt the need to safeguard from oblivion and the distortions and misrepresentations that have been made recently one of the oldest and most mystical traditions, that of tattooing.

What was once considered a mark dense with negative meanings in our country has now been normalized and is a permanent part of international showbiz. This is absolutely positive, but it carries the risk of a general flattening and loss of the true meaning that each person, differently from others, has always given to their own tattoo.

It was once said that a tattoo artist was nothing more than a skilled artisan who knew how to "scratch" away the skin and bring out and make visible the soul of each individual. This is the true meaning of a museum site like the one we will create, to safeguard an ancient tradition and art and to disseminate its history so that its deepest and unchanged meaning over the centuries can be understood.

The Tattoo Museum Rome is a private and self-funded facility that will tell all this: from tattoos as magical, religious, punitive rituals to therapeutic or tribal ones, using a path that will illustrate their forms and meanings. We will recount anecdotes, tales, and life stories, often adventurous, of those who have embraced this art out of passion and with a touch of brilliant madness at a time when choosing to become a tattoo artist was considered a major transgression and as such, socially frowned upon.

Artifacts, photographs, illustrations, and equipment of great cultural value will be part of the journey and will serve as the ideal link, the thin red line connecting a story that spans over a thousand years. Our goal is to preserve the soul and spirit of this ancient practice, which today appears overly diminished by superficiality and empty aestheticism.