Brazil. It is a long journey - a 15-hour flight, besides the stopovers – that envisages three flights and three laps: Monaco, San Paolo and Campo Grande. The mind has time to wander amidst fears and expectations concerning such a distant and different country.

Campo Grande is red from an aerial view due to the unmade suburban roads that reveal the soil's clay content. The plane makes just one stop for a few passengers to disembark, while the others who travel to New Guyana stay on board. There are no buses awaiting us and the runway is so small that we go on foot to the airport. We find Prof Aivone and Sergio Sato, her assistant, waiting for us outside. They offer me accommodation in their house. In this country walls limit both a private domestic space and an environment that is respectfully shared with colleagues, friends, students and domestic help. The place is always busy with everybody participating and helping. Even lunch is a community event - the churrasco. On Sundays they continuously warm meat and cheese kebabs until evening. They converse and chew the meat, while the company at table keeps changing. I muse over two points: time and talk. Projects envisaged for Brazil are many and ambitious, and the team that coordinates all commitments is formed by just three people. During my two-week stay I personally experienced the extent and responsibility of the work performed, and never perceived the tension of stress. "Everything has a ripening period", Prof Aivone repeatedly told me. You neither speed up nor slow down. You live by the moment, taking a break, laughing with colleagues, attending meetings and comparing notes. Establishing a dialogue requires work based on relations and friendship. A culture is especially studied through the people that experience it. Sergio told me that he has not taken a holiday for years: "How can I? And what if the natives came to see me? They are friends - they host us in their houses and we accommodate them in ours." The Campo Grande museum is the heart of a thick fabric of bonds and collaborations. It is both the landmark and representative site of native identities and a window for international exchange. The museum is neither an archive nor an ethnographic deposit, but a dynamic space that interacts with various users, numbering schools, natives, consuls, university teachers, technicians and attendants. "Here in Campo Grande we find it hard to convey our project's wide ranging features. We are recognised abroad, but here they still think that we are a mere exhibition," says Sergio, while he proudly takes me on a tour of the museum. The large building stands in a natural park. Two halls have been currently opened, one dedicated to natural sciences and the other to native Brazilian cultures. The first exhibits many examples of typical animals of the Pantanal area, while the second is a jewel born of cooperation with Massimo Chiappetta, former manager of fittings at the Museum of World Cultures in Genoa. Refined modern aesthetics merge with the semiotic study of the cultures represented. The hall is divided into sections, each presenting items belonging to a certain ethnic group in a framework that formally summarises the natural environment and signs adopted by man to interact with it: the spiral, the circle, the double, etc. Each sign's meaning is not self restricted but communicates with all the others. Despite internal divisions, the entire exhibition area is open to transversal correspondences in multiple levels and in all directions.

The museum's dynamic features are doubtless also ensured by the fact that it especially employs young enthusiast students from various university departments; each operates within his/her field of specialisation, focusing their passion on a common project.