Museo Archeologico Preistorico e Protostorico dei Grandi Scavi

Inside Castello Sforzesco, the Prehistory and Protohistory Section of Milan's archaeological museum gathers finds largely from Lombardy to narrate the deep past of the Po Valley, from the first Neolithic farmers through the Bronze and Iron Ages to the Celtic world on the eve of Romanisation.

Why it matters

Milan's story usually begins with the Romans, but the region's buried layers reach back millennia further. This section preserves the material culture of the ancient Po Valley, largely from Lombard sites, from the Neolithic (sixth to fourth millennium BC) through the Bronze and Iron Ages to the Romanisation at the end of the first millennium BC. Its Golasecca holdings are especially significant: the Golasecca culture, flourishing between the Bronze and Iron Ages around Lakes Maggiore and Varese, connected the Alpine world with Etruria and transalpine Europe, and the museum's own presentation singles out the extraordinary First Tomb of the Warrior of Sesto Calende.

What to notice

The collection presents technological and cultural change. Knapped and polished stone tools, ceramics and weaving implements illustrate the Neolithic's great innovations; axes, spearheads and funerary sets bring the Bronze Age to life; the Iron Age is represented by precious Golasecca pieces, above all the First Tomb of the Warrior of Sesto Calende, dated to the late seventh century BC. The final section presents material of Celtic culture of the fourth to first centuries BC — the peoples whom ancient tradition credits with founding the settlement from which Milan grew. The gallery sequence presents the holdings from technological evidence to burial ritual, showing how the Po Valley passed from prehistory into written history.

Context and history

The section belongs to the civic museums housed in Castello Sforzesco, where the city's archaeology collections have long been shown alongside the Castle's art museums; it falls under the scientific direction of the Civic Archaeological Museum on Corso Magenta. The "Grandi Scavi" designation refers to the great excavations that supplied the collections. The collection's narrative as described by the museum spans Neolithic to Celtic material largely from Lombard sites, and the bibliography on the museum's page offers a serious reading path for the history it guards. The castle's own scholarly apparatus — the Biblioteca Archeologica e Numismatica among its archives and libraries — supports study of the material on show, while the fortress courtyards are presented by the castle as an open-air museum in their own right, framing the prehistoric holdings as part of a much larger archaeological campus.