Civico Museo Archeologico di Muggia

The Civico Museo Archeologico di Muggia presents thousands of years of the peninsula's past across three floors: Bronze Age castellieri, Roman inscriptions, a stele of Mithras, and even objects from sites now lost beneath the sea.

Why it matters

Muggia's territory is one of the most archaeologically dense corners of the Province of Trieste, but its sites are scattered — hillforts on the Karst edge, a Romanesque basilica on the hill, Roman quays drowned by the rising Gulf. The civic museum, inaugurated in 1997 by the Comune di Muggia, gathers the evidence in one place. Its displays draw on about twenty-five archaeological sites in the Muggia area, including underwater remains of Roman villas and piers now submerged beneath the gulf.

The museum connects its collections with the surrounding landscape. Models and finds from the Castelliere di Elleri and the Necropoli di Santa Barbara illuminate ancient settlement on the hills above the town.

What to notice

The museum occupies Casa Veneta, a historic house with two-light windows characteristic of Muggia's Venetian-Istrian architecture. Its collections span prehistoric material through the Middle Ages, including ceramics and metal objects gathered in the mid-twentieth century. Finds from excavations on Monte Castellier at Elleri include a reconstructed tomb from the Necropoli di Santa Barbara, with necklaces, fibulae and rings. Two inscriptions and a stele dedicated to Mithras from the Roman sanctuary are shown alongside a reconstruction of the castelliere. A Roman altar of Caius Iulius Nicostratus, now used as an altar table in the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta at Muggia Vecchia, documents the later reuse of ancient stone.

Context and history

The museum also tells how the territory was discovered. Antiquarians recorded Muggia's ruins as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — the collections of Felice Feliciano and Marin Sanudo note two of its Roman inscriptions, and Pietro Coppo's 1540 treatise on Istria describes the territory's Roman remains — but systematic study began with Pietro Kandler in the mid-nineteenth century; an 1877 article by Richard Francis Burton, the English explorer who had reached Trieste as consul, made official the insight of Kandler's own collaborators that the castellieri were pre-Roman rather than Roman fortifications; and Carlo Marchesetti's work of 1903 laid the foundations of castelliere studies, with Karl Moser excavating at Elleri. The 1997 museum is the institutional outcome of that century and a half of research, and it documents the archaeological history of the Muggia area, including the Parco Archeologico di Muggia Vecchia.