Museo Archeologico Nazionale della Lomellina

Inside the fifteenth-century stables of Vigevano's castle, the state museum of Lomellina gathers the archaeology of a whole territory — finds once scattered through small local museums and superintendency stores. Its rooms run from the prehistoric age to the early Middle Ages, ending with the recovered Strada Collection.

Why it matters

Lomellina, the plain of rice fields and small towns between the Ticino and the Sesia, had no single place where its buried past could be read until this museum opened. The Ministry of Culture created it precisely to assemble material that was dispersed in minor collections and warehouses, and the result is the state's own territorial archaeological museum for the whole district. Its home is the so-called third stable of the Castello Visconteo-Sforzesco, an imposing brick hall on the west side of the ducal courtyard, with annexed spaces reaching into the Falconiera wing. The installation places archaeological material from the region within a Renaissance monument.

What to notice

The displays cover prehistoric and protohistoric material, Roman funerary assemblages from the late first century BC to the second century AD, settlements and daily life, and late-antique and early-medieval material from the third to the seventh century AD. Among the highlights, the ministry's page singles out the rich male grave goods from Gambolò — belt fittings, rings, armlets and dress pins dense with bronze — the elegant blown-glass vessels of first-century female tombs, the warrior burial from the Valeggio necropolis with its sword still in the scabbard, and the little mold-made vintner statuettes placed in Lomellina graves between the Augustan age and the mid first century AD. Later chapters are represented too: a hoard of some 1,400 late-third-century antoniniani ploughed up at Morsella in 1978, and Longobard-age pottery from the district's early medieval horizon. The complete Strada Collection, acquired by the Ministry through expropriation for public utility, became part of the museum in 2023.

Context and history

The museum arrived in stages: inaugurated in 1998 with a first layout, enlarged in 2006 with three additional rooms, and completed in 2018 when the great hall beside the stable opened to the public. The installation belongs to the broader restoration programme of the castle and respects the building's architecture, using the fifteenth-century stable for the late-Celtic and Roman necropolises that form the most significant archaeological documentation of the territory. The stables themselves date to 1471, when Galeazzo Maria Sforza commissioned Maffeo da Como, and were completed under Ludovico il Moro with Bramante's collaboration. After the Sforza, the castle became an army barracks — a role it kept until 1968 — before its conversion to culture.