MACA - Mantova Collezioni Antiche (Palazzo di San Sebastiano)

The palace Francesco II Gonzaga built to house Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar now guards a different treasure: the passions of four Mantuan collectors, from Roman statuary to Egyptian antiquities and a Mesopotamian collection. MACA is where Mantua's appetite for the ancient world, so evident at the Ducal Palace, gets its own dedicated museum.

Why it matters

Mantua's Renaissance princes collected antiquities as well as commissioning paintings, a history explored at MACA. Set in Palazzo San Sebastiano, the intimate residence Francesco II Gonzaga built between 1506 and 1512 beside the southern walls — Gerolamo Arcari and Bernardino Ghisolfo directed the works — it gathers classical, Egyptian and Mesopotamian material from four distinct collections with a shared origin: local men who brought the ancient world home. The building itself is part of the story: the hall once displayed Mantegna's nine Triumphs of Caesar canvases, now at Hampton Court.

What to notice

• The Sala dei Trionfi, where the scale of the room still recalls the great Mantegna canvases that hung here until the Gonzaga sales dispersed them to England.
• Ground-floor rooms devoted to Francesco II himself, with frescoed chambers recovered in restoration — including the Camera del Crogiuolo, Camera delle Frecce and Camera del Sole — and decorations by Lorenzo Leonbruno and other court painters.
• The classical sculpture and Roman material of the Vespasiano Gonzaga collection, evidence that collecting antiquity ran through the wider family, not only the marquises.
• Giuseppe Acerbi's Egyptian, Islamic and ethnological pieces, assembled around 1800 and moved here from Palazzo Te.
• The Mesopotamian collection of Ugo Sissa, a twentieth-century Mantuan architect and artist whose acquisitions make the museum unusually strong outside the Mediterranean canon.
• The adjacent Tempio Leon Battista Alberti, one of the earliest central-plan churches of the Renaissance, standing right beside the palace.

Context and history

Francesco II Gonzaga intended the palace as a personal seat of government and pleasure, and he kept it as his favourite residence until his death there in 1519. After him it declined quickly: the palace passed to cadet branches of the family, ceilings and furnishings were stripped for other Gonzaga residences, and under Austrian rule the building served as depot and barracks, with a spell as a lazaretto in 1883. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were harsher still — traffic engineering demolished part of the structure, while the interiors were used as baths, schools and clubhouses.

A restoration campaign begun in the 1990s recovered the fresco fragments and the marble loggia, and the palace reopened in 2005 as the Museo della Città, absorbing the old civic Risorgimento collection. In February 2023 the display was completely reconceived as MACA — Mantova Collezioni Antiche — refocused on the four collectors and the city's long romance with antiquity. The 2012 Emilia earthquakes damaged some rooms, making the restored state of the decorated chambers all the more worth seeing.