Museo Civico di Modena

The Museo Civico di Modena, founded in 1871 and housed in the Palazzo dei Musei since 1886, was created on the initiative of Carlo Boni. In keeping with the spirit of the time, the museum was conceived as a multidisciplinary laboratory and as a place of dialogue between prehistory, ethnography, and the decorative arts. The ethnological section, established in 1875 in an evolutionist context, has been enriched over time with collections from Africa, Amazonia, and Peru, often donated by travellers and missionaries in ways not always consistent with the original comparative project.

In the current display, which preserves its nineteenth-century furnishings, the American collections consist mainly of Andean and Amazonian artifacts, with smaller groups from North America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Particularly noteworthy are the Amazonian feather ornaments, especially those of the Mundurucù and the Tucano. Since 2019 the collection has been enriched with Yanomami artifacts gathered by Loretta Emiri, which are at the center of a re-display project that adopts a participatory and decolonial approach developed within the project “Letterature e patrimoni indigeni,” carried out in collaboration with Italian and Brazilian universities and with Indigenous communities of Amazonia.