The Angra do Heroísmo Museum promotes this Saturday, July 23, at 5 PM, the launching of the catalogue of an exhibition titled “Faces da Moeda” (Sides of a Coin), which has been open to the public at the Chapter Room since June 16 until and it may be visited until October 16.
This event also features a commented visit to the aforementioned exhibition, organised by the numismatists of the Angra do Heroísmo Philatelic Centre, which includes several explanations about the coins on display.
The texts that make up the catalogue address different aspects of this theme. Thus, the introduction, written by economist Paulo Quadros, discusses the evolution of the economic and symbolic value of currency. In turn, the texts written by Helena Ormonde, Director of the Angra do Heroísmo Museum, and Francisco Maduro-Dias, the Curator in charge of this exhibition, address the heritage significance of the pieces on display, selected as the most representative of a coin collection acquired in 2010. In fact, they evoke the dynamics and problems concerning the economic life in the Azores, depicting the various relations and paths that have built the life on these islands since settlement times.
The exhibition “Faces da Moeda” is of particular relevance as Angra do Heroísmo was the only Portuguese Atlantic archipelago that has witnessed the production of coins throughout the most important processes in a long journey that begins in the 16th century with D. António, Prior of Crato, and ends in the late 19th century with the liberal struggles and the political and economic crisis.