Journey through the changing, dreamlike symbols of snow

"I will see springs, summers, autumns pass by; and when winter comes, with its monotonous snows, I will lock my doors and windows, I will make my bewitched palaces in the night" wrote the great Baudelaire. An enraptured vision that of the great French poet, which the exhibition "The Sense of Snow" declines in a candidly dreamlike and densely symbolic manner.

The snowy mantle at the MUDEC - Museo delle Culture thus finds an original home in an itinerary that through its many forms becomes a crystal-clear showcase of not only climatic, but cultural, environmental, metropolitan and even anthropological changes. And it does so with over 150 works and objects ranging from ethnography to optical sciences and beyond, from paintings and sculptures to photographs, videos and contemporary installations, travelling from the lands of the Sami and Hinuit to extreme Japan and then on to Tierra del Fuego.

'It was a challenging job. This is the meaning of snow, the title of this exhibition, which completes the series of exhibitions we have dedicated to the Winter Olympics period in Cortina,' Tommaso Sacchi, the Councillor for Culture of the City of Milan, told our microphones.

"Basically, scientists had already realised several centuries ago that snowflakes, or rather crystals, have very different shapes from each other. But it wasn't until 1885, when Wilson Bentley was able to take the first micrograph of a snowflake that was followed by several thousand, that gave us the overwhelming proof that no two snowflakes are the same," says curator Sara Rizzo.

And again, 'this then allowed further study, thanks to Ukichiro Nakaya, another scientist who was then the first to create a sort of table of elements, dividing the snowflakes into families and also creating the first artificial snowflake'.