Museo di Archeologia e Minerali

The Museum of Archaeology and Minerals at the San Silvestro Archaeological Mining Park presents finds from the excavated mining landscape and specimens of the ores that shaped the district.

Why it matters

The museum condenses the park's double identity — archaeology and geology — into one introductory room. The Val di Cornia's ore bodies of copper, lead, silver and zinc drew Etruscan prospectors, medieval smelters under the Della Gherardesca counts, Medicean engineers and nineteenth-century industrial companies in turn, and the material culture of all those phases now lies scattered across 450 hectares of protected hillside. The collection places archaeological objects and minerals in context with the walls, shafts and spoil heaps of the surrounding industrial landscape. Together they illustrate the area's material history.

What to notice

The collection is organised around the history interpreted by the park. The archaeological material relates to excavations at the medieval mining settlement of Rocca San Silvestro, where houses, church, cemetery and industrial quarters have been uncovered since the 1980s. Mineral specimens represent the district's copper, lead, silver, iron and zinc sulphides, whose formation the park dates to roughly five million years ago. The geology helps explain the location of the villages and mines. The museum's exhibits connect geological resources with the settlement and industrial remains across the park.

Context and history

The museum belongs to the network created by Parchi Val di Cornia, the public company that has managed the archaeological and mining heritage behind Campiglia Marittima since the park project took shape. Scientific interest in the district revived in the 1980s, when medieval archaeologists of the University of Siena opened the first excavation campaign at the castle of Rocca San Silvestro; the finds that accumulated needed a place of presentation, and when the park opened in 1996 the museum was set up in the ticket building at the entrance area, in what had been service buildings of the early twentieth-century mining complex. Its role is to interpret the mining landscape through archaeological finds and mineral specimens. The museum is also known by the name Museo del Minerale.