Castello D’Albertis was built between 1886 and 1892, on the remains of medieval and Renaissance fortifications, in Neo-Gothic revival style, by Captain Enrico Alberto d’Albertis. Closed for several years for restoration and redesign of the exhibition project, it was reopened in 2004 with an itinerary that first winds through the historic rooms, arranged so as to convey a nineteenth-century positivist and colonialist perspective, and then, upon entering the sixteenth-century bastion, continues with a second itinerary in which the archaeological and ethnographic materials from Africa, the Americas, and Oceania are presented through dialogue and exchange with the communities from which they originate. The American collections of Castello D’Albertis include materials from North and South America, among which are the ethnographic and archaeological collections sent to Genoa for the 1892 celebrations, the artifacts collected by Captain D’Albertis during his 1896 journey among the Hopi and in Mexico, and fourteen pendant axes from the Nicoya culture of Costa Rica. From Peru come mummies, pre-Columbian and colonial artifacts, as well as finds from the Andes and the central coast. Later donations further enriched the holdings with Wayuù materials from Venezuela (1996), Bororo objects from Brazil (2004), and a totem pole from the Canadian Pacific coast (2007).

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