Un museo di niente in particolare

A museum of nothing in particular

It takes a certain nerve for a museum to announce that it contains nothing of importance. The Vessling Museum of Ordinary Things, which opened last month in a former ferry terminal on the city's waterfront, does so in its first line of wall text, and then, with a confidence that borders on mischief, proceeds to prove itself right. There are no crowns, no swords and no masterpieces. There are, instead, eleven hundred objects that nobody ever thought to keep, and a good many visitors who seem delighted to find them.

The curators have gathered them under headings of studied modesty: Things Lost, Things Mended, Things Left on Buses. A cabinet of single gloves is arranged by size, so that the gentle progression from a toddler's mitten to a labourer's gauntlet reads, unexpectedly, like a portrait of growing up. Elsewhere, a wall of reading glasses, each pair accompanied by a handwritten prescription, makes the collective case that the human race has always squinted at the same thing, which is the small print.

The best gallery, and the one that justifies the whole enterprise, is the room devoted to repairs. Here a teapot has been mended with such a tangle of wire and solder that the repair has become the object; a pair of boots has been resoled so often that little of the original survives. A label observes, drily, that the owner "regarded replacement as a failure of imagination". One leaves the room with a faint, pleasing guilt about the drawer of broken things at home.

Not everything succeeds. The museum's central conceit, that the ordinary becomes extraordinary the moment it is placed behind glass, is a good one, but it cannot be repeated indefinitely, and by the third room of bottle tops and bus tickets the effect begins to wear thin. The audio guide, narrated in a hushed and reverent tone suited to a cathedral, is the museum's single serious misjudgement. Hearing a solemn voice describe a sock as "a witness to ordinary courage" makes a visitor long for the sock to be left alone.

There is, besides, an unresolved question about who is being flattered. The wall texts speak warmly of "everyday lives", yet the collection leans, perhaps inevitably, towards the things that survive: the sturdy, the sentimental, the lucky. Those that truly vanished without trace, the disposable and the unremarked, are present only as absences, and the museum's one attempt to acknowledge this, a bare shelf labelled "Things We Could Not Find", is more witty than convincing.

Still, it would be churlish to dwell on faults in a place so evidently made with affection. The staff, many of them volunteers, will happily tell you where each object came from, and the stories they tell are better than the labels. On my visit a guide described a single button, found in a field, with the air of one introducing a distant relative, and I found that I was listening to the end.

The museum will not change anyone's life and, to its credit, never claims that it will. What it may do is something quieter and arguably more useful: it teaches the visitor to look. I left through the gift shop, where, in a final flourish, nothing is for sale but postcards of objects that are not in the collection. I bought three. It seemed only fair, and rather cheaper than a ticket to anywhere else.