Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Aquileia

A nineteenth-century villa of the noble Cassis Faraone family has held Aquileia's state antiquities since 1882, when the Imperial Regio Museum opened here. The collection spans the villa, a naval section, lapidary galleries and storerooms: mosaics, portraits, glass and tombs from an Adriatic port city of the early empire.

Why it matters

The ministry's own presentation calls this the oldest and most visited museum complex of the Aquileia archaeological site, the UNESCO property inscribed for the wealth of a Roman city founded in 181 BC. What distinguishes the museum is range rather than spectacle. Because Aquileia traded across the Mediterranean towards Central Europe, its museum holds objects that arrived by sea and by road: an alabaster urn, a glass box with gold-band decoration, gems and portraits beside the ordinary tools of a working city. The National Archaeological Museum of Aquileia functions as an interpretive counterpart to the forum and basilica, giving names, dates and contexts to the archaeological remains across the site.

What to notice

Among the masterpieces the museum itself lists are the mosaic of the unswept floor, its tesserae scattered with the debris of a banquet; the gold-band glass box; an alabaster urn; a stele of a blacksmith; a portrait of an elderly man; and a head of Apollo. A gallery of portraits presents, in the ministry's phrase, the faces of Aquileia's ancient inhabitants. The galleries present the city's lagoon and river geography, the domus and private space, Aquileia as a Mediterranean gateway, and the territory's productive activities. Outside, the lapidary galleries line up hundreds of inscriptions and funerary monuments, and the historic garden holds larger pieces among the greenery. The storerooms form part of the museum's wider research collection.

Context and history

The villa at the heart of the complex was a private residence of the Cassis Faraone family, later acquired by the Habsburg state; the museum opened on 3 August 1882 in the presence of Archduke Carl Ludwig. The first display followed an antiquarian arrangement by material and type, and was progressively updated during the twentieth century as excavations fed the collection — the archaeologist Giovanni Battista Brusin led the institution from 1922 into the post-war years, and a mid-century reinstallation reopened in 1954 with a new quadriportico built for the lapidary galleries. A comprehensive reinstallation concluded in 2018 — the museum marks its founding anniversary on 3 August — reorganising the display into eight thematic sections across three floors of the villa, from the city and its territory on the ground floor up to a section devoted to luxury and wealth, with hundreds of gems and cameos.