The museum has no rooms: it has carriages. An FS 835 locomotive and three “centoporte” coaches, parked at Vallecrosia al Mare, hold the collection that the singer Erio Tripodi built out of his own passion for music and named “Tempio Museo della Canzone”. The official name is Museum of Song and Sound Reproduction, and both halves count: Italian song sits here next to the machines that used to play it.
What to see
Lined up in the compartments of the centoporte coaches are the devices that made music mechanically, before electric amplification: music boxes, hand-cranked barrel organs of various sizes, mechanical pianos and player pianos, fine engineering kept in working order. They are objects to look at close up, because the real subject is the mechanism: combs, pinned cylinders, perforated paper rolls.
Alongside the instruments runs the documentary side, gathered by Tripodi over the years: sheet music, records, photographs and performers' memorabilia, from street music to today's popular song, with a section on the Sanremo Festival, held a little further east along the same coast. A separate coach houses the study centre, with a library and an archive open to consultation.
Visiting
The museum stands on via Roma in Vallecrosia al Mare, province of Imperia, and opens Thursday to Sunday in the morning; visits are guided, which is worth taking here, because the instruments are set going by people who know them. No booking is needed. Getting there is easy: the town has a stop on the Genoa-Ventimiglia railway line, and the Sanremo-Ventimiglia trolleybus route runs along the Aurelia, which crosses the whole municipality.
Our editors' tip
We always ask to hear at least one barrel organ played: the distance between reading a label and hearing an instrument fill a wooden compartment is the whole reason this museum exists. And before leaving we walk round the outside of the train: the locomotive seen from the track, with the coaches hooked on behind, explains better than any caption why the collection ended up in there.
