Museo delle Civiltà

The Museo delle Civiltà (MUCIV), in its new configuration inaugurated in 2016, is an institute with special autonomy under the Ministry of Culture.

Its collections are distributed between two sites as follows:
– the Palazzo delle Scienze houses the prehistoric and protohistoric, palaeoethnological and litho-mineralogical, Early Medieval, archaeological, ethnographic, and historical-artistic collections of extra-European and colonial provenance;
– the Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari houses the collections of Italian popular arts and traditions.

The MUCIV also includes the collections of the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico, founded by the archaeologist Luigi Pigorini in 1875 and inaugurated the following year in a wing of the Palazzo del Collegio Romano, where the prehistoric and ethnographic collections of the Museo Kircheriano, one of the most fascinating seventeenth-century Wunderkammern (“cabinets of curiosities”), were likewise kept.

The Museo delle Civiltà’s Collection of Arts and Cultures of the Americas derives precisely from the former Museo Preistorico Etnografico and comprises around 20,000 artifacts, archaeological finds, and ethnographic objects from various geographical and cultural contexts of North, Central, and South America, covering a broad chronological span from antiquity to the nineteenth century. The channels through which these objects arrived in Italy are diverse. Some came in the wake of the “exotic” interests of private or scientific collecting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; others were taken from places visited by Italian exploratory expeditions in the nineteenth century; still others are the result of donations and purchases of collections made by missionaries, travelers, and collectors, or of exchanges with Italian and international cultural institutions.