Museo Civico di Archeologia, Storia e Arte - Palazzo Traversa

In a late-Gothic palace at the heart of Bra, the city's oldest museum gathers archaeology from the Roman town of Pollentia, paintings and sculptures from three centuries, and curiosities ranging from an Egyptian mummy fragment to the actual wood of a revolutionary Tree of Freedom planted in 1798.

Why it matters

Palazzo Traversa is where Bra keeps its memory. The museum descends from the "Museo Popolare di Storia e d'Arte Braidese" opened in 1919 thanks to Euclide Milano, a teacher and scholar of local history and ethnography, and it remains the essential stop for understanding the deep timeline of this territory — above all the Roman city of Pollentia, whose remains survive at nearby Pollenzo. The setting is half the experience: the museum occupies a late-Gothic building whose original core dates to around the mid-fifteenth century, a rare survival of the town's medieval domestic architecture.

What to notice

The exhibition spreads over three floors of the palace, with a layout that connects these collections. On the ground floor, stones and inscribed finds — epigraphic material salvaged from buildings and fields — announce the archaeological theme. The main floor holds the art and historical collections in a sequence of period rooms; in the loggia, look for the segments of the Tree of Freedom, planted in Bra in 1798 during the revolutionary period and later found reused, remarkably, in the roof truss of a nearby house. The second floor returns to archaeology with a chronological and thematic path through Roman Pollentia. The museum also records a fragment of an Egyptian mummy — the lower legs and feet — of unknown origin, noted by Milano among his "different Antiquities". Art holdings span the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries: Caravaggio-influenced altarpieces from the circle of Giovanni Antonio Molineri and copies after Valentin de Boulogne hang beside portraits of Savoy nobility and a gallery of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Piedmontese painting and sculpture.

Context and history

The palace on Via Parpera took shape from a late-Gothic core around the middle of the fifteenth century, a construction traditionally attributed to a branch of the Malabaila family, with the Traversa name arriving through later owners who added the neo-Gothic corner tower at the end of the nineteenth century. The museum it now houses was born in 1919 as a popular museum of Bra history and art, the project of Euclide Milano, who organised the collections to document the territory starting from the Roman era, when Pollentia flourished as a milestone town on the road network of the Po valley's southern edge. The palace itself had been donated to the town of Bra in 1935 on condition that it serve as a museum; the archaeology, history and art section moved here from the Craveri house in 1972, and after radical restoration in the 1980s the museum emerged as the civic institution of today, managed within the Musei di Bra circuit alongside the Craveri museum and the Toy Museum . Educational activities connect the collection with the town's cultural life.