Museo delle Civiltà

From September 2016, in a complex plan to reform and reorganize the structures of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, the Museo delle Civiltà was born in Rome.

Its institution has allowed four major national museums to be grouped into one body:

Museo preistorico etnografico "Luigi Pigorini"Museo delle arti e tradizioni popolari "Lamberto Loria"Museo d'arte orientale "Giuseppe Tucci"Museo dell'alto Medioevo "Alessandra Vaccaro"

The birth of this important place of culture will allow us to manage, enhance and promote in a unified and innovative way unique archaeological and ethnographic collections in Italy, to be able to spread to an ever wider public those sectors of our heritage considered up to now of exclusive interest by specialists and enthusiasts.

Museo Preistorico etnografico "Luigi Pigorini"

Among the most important museums in the world with regard to extra-European ethnographic collections - North America, South America, Oceania, Asia, Africa - and the most important Italian museum for prehistoric collections. It has a strategic role on the international scene, participating and promoting projects of cultural and political importance, and as in the very vocation of the city of Rome, it is open to the policies of recognition of diversity.

The Museum was founded on 14 March 1876 by Luigi Pigorini (1842-1925) in the center of Rome, in a wing of the Palazzo del Collegio Romano, the current seat of the MiBAC, built at the end of the sixteenth century by the Compagnia di Gesù. Since the XVII century the Jesuit College had hosted the collection of antiquities and various curiosities put together by Father Athanasius Kircher. The new institution conceived by Luigi Pigorini was born around the nucleus of prehistoric and ethnographic objects of the dissolved Kircherian Museum. The Museum was moved to its current location between 1962 and 1977, the Palazzo delle Scienze, built for the Universal Exposition of Rome in 1942 (E.U.R.). Here it has preserved its original organization in two sectors: one dedicated to Palethnology and one to extra-European ethnography.

The Museum is organized into two large exhibition areas dedicated to Ethnography and Prehistory, located respectively on the first and second floors of the building. Three rooms are visible for the Ethnography: The Americas, Oceania, Africa.

For the Americas section we have testimonies of the population of America and of the first contact with Europeans (idol Taíno); the historical development of ancient Mesoamerica, the cultural evolution that starts from the Olmecs (1700-300 BC) and reaches the masterpieces of Aztec art (1300-1521 AD): evidence of daily life, of funeral rituals, of the complex world magic-religious. The route ends with the room dedicated to Ancient Peru: 2500 years of history of the Andean peoples until the arrival of the Spanish colonizers.

In the Africa section, three stages document the exhibition itinerary: the first meetings between Europe and Africa, the first African objects brought to Italy (XVI-XVII century) and the discovery of African art in the early 1900s.

The path of Oceania is organized by thematic areas, from the "Case of the men" of New Guinea, to the relationships of man with the earth, to the social organization between sacredness and power.

For the Prehistory, the exhibition itinerary unfolds in chronological order from the human manifestations of the Paleolithic age, to the hunting and gathering activities, to the first communities that evolved from the village to the city. An important testimony is the underwater excavation of Lake Bracciano with the great pirogue of 8000 years ago.Location: Palazzo della Scienza Universale - Piazza Guglielmo Marconi, 14 - Rome

Museo delle arti e tradizioni popolari "Lamberto Loria"

In Italy it is the only state museum with specific competences in the field of demo-ethno-anthropological subjects, its purpose is the documentation of the popular traditions of all the Italian regions and preserves over one hundred thousand documents, acquired from 1906 to today.

The Museum was born from the Italian Ethnography Exhibition held in Rome in 1911 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Unification of Italy and its founder was Lamberto Loria (1855-1913), an ethnologist, who after completing several study expeditions to countries outside Europe , he realized, during a brief stay in the Sannio, that ethnographic research had to be done even in the Italy of the beginning of the twentieth century. It was, in fact, necessary to document that agro-pastoral culture which at the time was undergoing great modifications due to the progressive industrialization of near and distant areas and the consequent emigration from rural centers.

All the museum's documentary material is currently available to the public through numerous services: the library, the historical archive that preserves documents relating to the acquisition of objects, the prints cabinet, the photographic archive, the sound archive, the archive of visual anthropology, ethnographic deposits, cataloging and loan inventory department, restoration laboratory and audiovisual laboratory. The Museum, in fact, due to its specificity and uniqueness throughout the national territory, is also a data collection, research and documentation center.Location: Palazzo delle Arti e delle Tradizioni popolari - Piazza Guglielmo Marconi, 8/10 - Rome

Museo d'arte orientale "Giuseppe Tucci"

It preserves the finds of the excavations of the Italian archaeological missions in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as the objects purchased in Nepal and Tibet by Giuseppe Tucci (one of the greatest orientalists of the twentieth century) between 1928 and 1954.

The Museum was established in 1957 with the Decree of the President of the Republic, and was opened to the public in 1958. On May 31, 2005, the Museum was named after Giuseppe Tucci (1894-1984), one of the greatest orientalists of the twentieth century, who he promoted the foundation.

The Museum performs tasks of protecting the artistic and archaeological objects coming from Asian countries in the national context, providing, in collaboration with the Territorial Superintendencies, to control the customs transit of cultural assets, to avoid the dispersion of public and private collections, providing advice to the Public institutions in the areas of their competence, and promoting the knowledge of Asian cultures among the Italian public by organizing exhibitions, conferences, guided tours of their collections.

The initial nucleus of the collections is formed by the finds deposited by the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East (IsMEO), today the Italian Institute for Africa and the East (IsIAO), and coming from its archaeological missions in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as objects purchased in Nepal and Tibet by Giuseppe Tucci between 1928 and 1954. The patrimony was then increased over the years thanks to purchases made by the State in private households, to donations from private individuals and institutions, as well as to exchanges with various Asian states.

Over the years the Museum facilities have been enriched with useful structures for carrying out its activities: a specialized Library, a Restoration Laboratory, a Photo Archive, an Archive of Oriental Collections in Italy, a Service of Bioarchaeology and Electron Microscopy, a Service educational.

The museum is transferred to the EUR in the Palace of Sciences of the Museum of Civilizations. The new construction is scheduled for the end of 2020.Location: Palazzo della Scienza Universale - Piazza Guglielmo Marconi, 14 - Rome

Museo dell'alto Medioevo "Alessandra Vaccaro"

Opened in 1967 in the Palazzo delle Scienze in Eur with the aim of equipping Rome with an archaeological museum of the post-classical age and promoting research on a strategic period for the study of the transformation of the ancient world, the Museum exhibits materials dating from between IV and XIV century, mostly from Rome and central Italy. Three late imperial portraits, some votive and funerary epigraphs and a precious gold crossbow fibula with a fretwork decoration date back to late antique Rome (4th-6th century). Follow the testimonies of the Lombard occupation in Umbria and in the Marche (VI-VII century) with the two most important necropolises of central Italy (Nocera Umbra and Castel Trosino), which constitute the nucleus of excellence with their weapons sets , jewels, ivories, bronze and ceramic glasses and pottery. The following Carolingian age is illustrated by a conspicuous group of marble reliefs coming from the architectural decoration of the churches of Rome and Lazio, deeply renewed at the time of the "Carolingian renaissance" (IX-X century). At the same time belong the furnishings and objects of use coming from two farms of papal foundation, the domuscultae of S. Cornelia and S. Rufina, created in the Roman countryside for the supply of the city (end VIII-X sec. ) and continued with other functions until the middle ages. The path ends with the "Coptic" collection consisting of reliefs and fabrics that offer a significant exemplification of the artistic production of late-antique and early medieval Egypt (V-X century). In the Museum is also exhibited the extraordinary decoration in opus sectile (inlay of colored marble) that adorned the representation room of a monumental domus outside Porta Marina in Ostia.Location: Palazzo della Scienza Universale - Viale Lincoln, 3 - Rome