Museo Civico archeologico e di scienze naturali “Federico Eusebio”

Founded in 1897, Alba's civic museum tells two stories at once: the deep human past of Alba Pompeia, from Neolithic camps to the Roman city of Pertinax, and the natural history of the Langhe. It was built by one nineteenth-century scholar's obsession and is still the civic reference point for the region's origins.

Why it matters

Museo Civico archeologico e di scienze naturali Federico Eusebio is where Alba keeps its origins — begun through Federico Eusebio's initiative. Its archaeological heart documents prehistoric settlement around the city and the Roman town of Alba Pompeia — birthplace of the emperor Pertinax — while its natural science rooms extend the story into geology, zoology and botany. That double identity is rare for a town of Alba's size and reflects the encyclopaedic collecting culture of late nineteenth-century Italian scholars. Housed since 1976 in a wing of the former Dominican convent in the Cortile della Maddalena, the museum is managed by the Comune di Alba and has been progressively reinstalled to integrate old collections with finds from three decades of new excavations.

What to notice

The museum's archaeological collections are organized in two principal sections. The prehistoric room presents Neolithic and later material from the Alba area, giving a sense of how early and how continuously these hills were occupied. The Roman section then assembles inscriptions, funerary monuments and everyday objects from Alba Pompeia — epigraphic fragments that let you read the names of the town's inhabitants directly. The natural-science rooms — geology, zoology and botany — present the Langhe's natural history alongside the archaeological collections.

Context and history

Federico Eusebio assembled the founding collection in the 1890s, in the decades when civic archaeology was flourishing across Piedmont. The museum moved to its current convent wing in 1976, when the natural history sections were added to the original archaeological core. A more recent reinstallation has woven the historical collection together with material from excavations of the last thirty years, sharpening what is known about local prehistory and the Roman city.