Museo Archeologico e d'Arte della Maremma (MAAM)

Grosseto's museum of Maremma archaeology and art occupies the former courthouse on Piazza Baccarini. Inside, the story runs from Palaeolithic hunters to the Etruscan city of Roselle and onward to Sienese gold-ground painting, gathered around a collection begun in 1860 by canon Giovanni Chelli and shared with the diocese's sacred-art museum.

Why it matters

Provincial museums are usually reliable rather than remarkable; the MAAM is both. It is the scholarly memory of the Maremma — the municipality's own description gives it a primary role in the study of ancient Roselle, the Etruscan and Roman city whose remains lie a few kilometres north — and it pairs that job with an art collection of real rank. In 1975 the civic archaeology collection and the Diocese's museum of sacred art were joined under one roof, bringing together prehistoric tools, Etruscan funerary furniture, Roman portraits, medieval sculpture and Renaissance panels in a nineteenth-century palace that once heard court cases. The regional government lists it among Tuscany's museums of regional significance.

What to notice

The museum's sections form a chronological narrative. The opening rooms hold canon Chelli's founding collection, Etruscan material from Chiusi and Volterra, whose star object is a sixth-century BC bucchero bowl incised with the Etruscan alphabet — provenance uncertain, the label admits, either Roselle or the southern Etruscan zone. The section on Roselle presents the city founded at the end of the Iron Age, conquered by Rome in 294 BC according to tradition, a bishop's seat by the late fifth century — its survival and changes told through the excavated material, including a marble portrait of the empress Livia and the furnishings of the necropolis. Upstairs, the Grosseto area's own prehistory and protohistory take over, with Greek and Carthaginian amphorae testifying to the lagoon's trade. The upper floors hand over to sacred art: since 1975 the Museo d'Arte Sacra della Diocesi, founded in 1933 around monsignor Cappelli's collection, shows Sienese painting from diocesan churches — a Last Judgment attributed to Guido da Siena, Sassetta's Madonna delle Ciliegie from the cathedral, panels by Pietro di Domenico and Girolamo di Benvenuto — followed by material on Grosseto's history.

Context and history

The museum began modestly in March 1860, when canon Giovanni Chelli attached his antiquities to the library he had founded; Grosseto was then a town of about four thousand people still enclosed by its Medici walls. Municipal property from 1865, the collection became an autonomous museum only in 1955, and received its present name and its present palace — the former courthouse on Piazza Baccarini — with the new installation of 1975, in which the diocesan sacred-art museum was incorporated. Since then the institution has grown into a research hub as much as a display: the municipality credits it with a leading role in Roselle studies, and its bibliographies anchor the site's scholarship. A regional decree of 2012 listed it among Tuscany's museums of regional significance. Its collections continue to support research on the region's archaeology and art.