Museo Civico Etnografico “Giovanni Podenzana”

The Museo Etnografico “Giovanni Podenzana” is one of the oldest sections of the Museo Civico della Spezia, founded in 1873; it preserves, studies, exhibits, and promotes local and non-European ethnographic material collected since the mid-nineteenth century.

The museum presents itself as a center for research and dissemination on anthropological and ethnographic themes, with particular attention to the geographical area known as the Historic Lunigiana, thanks to collaborations with institutions of national and international importance.
The non-European section includes artifacts from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania, which reached La Spezia thanks to explorers, sailors, scholars, and travellers.

Collected as ethnographic data, spoils of war, or mere curiosities, these artifacts served as tangible evidence of encounters with distant cultures with which people had come into contact in various ways.