Ma – Museo africano

The Ma – Museo africano of the Missionari Comboniani in Verona was founded in 1938 with the aim of showing the activities of the Comboni missionaries in Africa. In the following decades the museum was renewed several times in order to establish, within the local context, an institution addressed to all those interested in Africa. The most recent refurbishment, which introduced a strong multimedia component, took place in 2014.

Although the museum’s collections are largely devoted to Africa, it also preserves American artifacts, both archaeological and ethnographic (some of them not of Indigenous manufacture, such as souvenirs and replicas), coming from Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. The most relevant nuclei for the purposes of the present survey, described below, consist of archaeological materials from Ecuador and Mexico, as well as some ethnographic objects from Amazonian regions of Brazil.