Museo delle Civiltà


The Museo delle Civiltà is an Italian state museum in the EUR district of Rome.
WWW museodellecivilta.it

History and structure

The museum was created in 2016 following three decrees by the Minister for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, Dario Franceschini. The new institute brought together within a single administration, with special autonomy, the collections of four national museums that had been separate until then, three of which were already located in their respective locations in Piazza Guglielmo Marconi, namely:
These were later joined by the collections of two other dissolved museums, namely the African Museum and the National Geological Museum.
Initially, the Museum of Civilisations was intended as a "museum of museums", maintaining a formal distinction between the six institutes and naming them after their respective founders or in any case significant figures for their areas of expertise.
These criteria, however, were changed in 2022 under the directorship of Andrea Viliani, who took office at the beginning of the year and proposed a different approach by promoting the integration of the collections with an interdisciplinary perspective, and the creation of a modern anthropological museum.

Buildings and collections

The museum is housed in two rationalist-style buildings, connected by an imposing colonnade and designed – like the entire EUR district – to host the 1942 Universal Exhibition E42, which never took place due to the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions is located in the Palace of Popular Traditions, specifically designed to house its exhibits: they were in fact supposed to constitute the Exhibition of Popular Arts and Traditions during E42. However, the museum only opened in 1956.
The Prehistory and Ethnography Museum and the Museum of the Early Middle Ages have been located since 1967 in the contemporary Palace of Sciences, originally designed and built to host the Universal Science Exhibition during E42.
The collections of the other museums that merged into the Museum of Civilisations were then placed in the same building:
  • the National Museum of Oriental Art, formerly located in Palazzo Brancaccio in the Esquilino district
  • the former Colonial Museum, which exhibited artefacts linked to Italian colonialism, for which a critical and decolonial exhibition is currently underway
  • finally, following an agreement between the and the Museum of Civilisations, the geo-paleontology and litho-mineralogy collections of the former National Geological Museum have also been transferred here. An initial layout of the ISPRA collections was presented in December 2022 and their integration will be completed by the end of 2024.

Directors

Since its founding, the museum has been directed by:
  • Leandro Ventura
  • Filippo Maria Gambari
  • Loretta Paderni
  • Andrea Viliani