International Museum of the Mask
Amleto and Donato Sartori

The Museum

On 30 December 2004, Centro Maschere e Strutture Gestuali opened the International Museum of the Mask Amleto and Donato Sartori in the eighteenth-century Villa Trevisan Savioli: a modern and dynamic Museum that documents the personality and artistic careers of Amleto Sartori and his son Donato and part of the prestigious collection formed as a result of scrupulous research all over the world.
The former, a sculptor and poet, dedicated the last years of his life to research into the origin of the Italian art mask and he made the first masks of the reborn Commedia dell'Arte for the plays produced by Strehler, De Bosio, Barrault and for the greatest of the twentieth-century Arlecchini, the actor Marcello Moretti, but also for Eduardo De Filippo and many other leading European actors.
After his father's early death, Donato Sartori, while pursuing his own career as a sculptor, continued the relationship in Italy with the Piccolo Teatro in Milan and began an intense collaboration with Dario Fo, Peter Oskarson (Swedish director) and, more recently, with Moni Ovadia. In the meantime he also continued collaborating with the leading directors and actors in the French theatre and began a new relationship with the American and European avant-garde theatre, not only with theatrical productions but with multidisciplinary and multimedia activities.
In 1979 he founded Centro Maschere e Strutture Gestuali with Paola Piizzi and Paolo Trombetta and began autonomous research which, starting from sculpture, led him to investigate beyond the mask, exploring the theme of the total mask and of urban masking, experimenting with it in a great many European and American capitals, but also in Japan, Russia, China and Australia with the Centro team.