Museo Civico Archeologico

The Civic Archaeological Museum of Bologna opened in 1881. Its collections document Felsina and Etruria alongside Egyptian, Greek and Roman history, with burial goods, a marble Athena and a substantial numismatic collection.

Why it matters

The museum's Egyptian, Etruscan and Villanovan collections document different periods of Bologna's past and the history of the Mediterranean. The Egyptian section includes holdings assembled by painter Pelagio Palagi; the Etruscan and Villanovan galleries preserve thousands of objects from local necropolises. Greek and Roman galleries, a lapidary courtyard and a numismatic collection of roughly one hundred thousand pieces broaden the collection.

What to notice

The Egyptian collection includes five relief fragments from the tomb of Horemheb at Saqqara, the general under Akhenaten who became pharaoh, acquired through Pelagio Palagi's collection. Villanovan and Etruscan galleries include thousands of tomb assemblages from necropolises such as Benacci, Arnoaldi, San Vitale and Savena, including the late eighth-century BC askos of Benacci. The museum also preserves the bronze-foundry deposit from San Francesco, with more than fourteen thousand objects, and the figured bronze situla from the Certosa necropolis. In the Greek gallery is a Roman-age marble copy of the Athena Lemnia after Phidias; the Roman gallery includes an armoured marble torso of Nero. The courtyard lapidary contains milestones from the Via Aemilia.

Context and history

The museum opened to the public in 1881, born from the fusion of two older collections: the university museum descended from the "Stanza delle Antichità" that Luigi Ferdinando Marsili attached to the Academy of Sciences he founded in 1714, and the civic collection enriched by the bequest of Pelagio Palagi, the Bolognese painter and collector who died in 1860 leaving his antiquities to the city. Palagi's Egyptian holdings rest on a purchase made between 1817 and 1828 from Giuseppe Nizzoli, former chancellor of the Austrian consulate in Alexandria: more than three thousand one hundred pieces including mummies, sarcophagi, bronzes, papyri and the Saqqara reliefs.

The city installed the merged museum in the fifteenth-century Palazzo Galvani, the old hospital of Santa Maria della Morte, reworked for the purpose in the 1870s, facing the Archiginnasio. Excavations in and around Bologna kept feeding it: the Etruscan necropolises uncovered during the city's expansion, the finds from the Etruscan burial ground discovered in 1869 at the Certosa, and material from across the former Felsina territory, so the galleries doubled as an atlas of the local landscape before Rome.