Museo Archeologico del Friuli Occidentale

Born from one count's forty-year obsession with the fields around his castle, the Archaeological Museum of Western Friuli lays out twenty rooms of prehistory, protohistory and Roman times inside Torre Castle — from Palù di Livenza prehistoric finds to the imperial villa the count himself uncovered in the 1950s.

Why it matters

Western Friuli's deep past has no better interpreter. The museum grew out of the systematic campaign that Count Giuseppe di Ragogna (1902-1970) began in the 1930s, digging first in his own castle garden and then across the countryside of Torre with the help of farmers he recruited through newspaper notices and radio appeals. His credo — for an archaeologist, a potsherd is worth more than a coin — produced a collection built on stratigraphy and settlement evidence rather than treasure, which is why it still documents an entire territory: the plain between the Livenza and the Tagliamento from the Middle Palaeolithic through the Copper Age, the Bronze and Iron Ages, Romanisation, and the medieval world that followed. After 1970, castle and collections became public property, and the twenty-room circuit opened inside the castle itself.

What to notice

The collections span prehistoric material from the Middle Palaeolithic through the Neolithic and Copper Age, including finds from Palù di Livenza, a prehistoric pile-dwelling site inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list in 2011. Other holdings include protohistoric bronze and iron objects; finds from the imperial-era villa of Torre, discovered in the 1950s on the Noncello's left bank; necropolis assemblages from Tramonti di Sotto; material from Palazzo Ricchieri; and medieval and Renaissance ceramics from Torre and Pordenone. Etruscan vessels, mostly bucchero from chamber tombs, and votive objects from Magna Graecia are also represented.

Context and history

Count di Ragogna's project anticipated modern preventive archaeology by decades: he mapped finds, published his results, and treated local workers as collaborators, so the museum's documentation runs deeper than most early-twentieth-century private collections. His first excavation took place, fittingly, in the castle's own garden, where the story of the site and its territory could be read in one trench. The museum was later established by the Comune of Pordenone in the castle's rooms and joined the civic-museum system, alongside the art gallery of Palazzo Ricchieri and the Silvia Zenari natural history museum.