Civico Museo Archeologico Anton Maria Mucchi

The archaeological wing of Mu.Sa. keeps the ancient face of Salò: the contents of the Roman necropolis of Lugone, funerary inscriptions from the Gardesana countryside, and evidence of lake villas, gathered around the collection of Anton Maria Mucchi, the Emilia-born artist who spent his last decades on this shore and left the town its civic museum in 1943.

Why it matters

Salò's Roman past is easy to miss from the lakefront, and the Mucchi museum is where it becomes legible. The museum's official page records that the civic archaeological museum was established in 1943, growing from the passions of Anton Maria Mucchi, an intellectual and artist of Emilian origins who married the Salò native Lucia Tracagni in 1898, lived in the town from 1921 until his death in 1945, and in 1928 was named honorary inspector of the Monuments Superintendency. His collecting ranged from Egyptian and Magna Graecian antiquities to Roman material and modern painting, and the civic institution born of it today anchors the archaeological section of Mu.Sa. The collections document the Garda shore under Rome, when villas lined the water and burial grounds such as Lugone served local communities.

What to notice

The heart of the display is the Lugone necropolis, a Roman burial ground in use between the first and the end of the fourth century AD, excavated in 1961-62 and again in 1972-76 by the Gruppo Grotte Gavardo under the Superintendency's direction. About 165 tombs came to light, probably serving an as-yet-unidentified villa that the page describes as an agricultural and commercial hub of the territory; the grave goods found here are shared between Mu.Sa. and the Museo della Valle Sabbia in Gavardo, so the Salò rooms show one half of a find that is itself a piece of the lake's economic history. Alongside the necropolis material, seven stone inscriptions, mostly funerary, recovered from the territory around Salò, record names, ages and affections of the Roman community in carved letters. A newer subsection turns to the Roman villas of the lake, with two cases devoted to the Villa dei Nonii Arrii at Toscolano Maderno, its painted wall plasters and associated finds evoking the decorative world of a lakeside estate. Mucchi's own antiquities, once shown in the old museum, have flowed into these galleries.

Context and history

The institution embodies an early-twentieth-century model of the learned collector. Mucchi arrived as an outsider, married into the town, and turned his eye from painting to antiquity; his appointment as honorary inspector in 1928 made his private passion semi-official, and in 1943, two years before his death, the city formally instituted its archaeological museum around the holdings. The postwar decades transformed the collection from a cabinet of antiquities into an excavated record of the territory, as the systematic digs at Lugone brought stratified evidence into the museum for the first time. The museum moved into the Santa Giustina complex, where the civic archaeological collection forms a section of Mu.Sa. with its own rooms, labels and research profile.