Museo della Città (Palazzo Sichardt)

Inside an eighteenth-century merchant palace, the Museo della Città retells the story of Rovereto and its people through interactive, technology-rich rooms.

Why it matters

Rovereto already preserves its art at MART and its wars in the castle; what the Museo della Città adds is the city itself — its territory, families, industries and personalities — presented as a single immersive story. Opened in 2019 by the Fondazione Museo Civico, it is a deliberately multisensory museum: sound, image and hands-on stations carry the visitor through themes rather than chronologies. The setting complements the narrative. Palazzo Sichardt is an aristocratic town house built by a family of Nuremberg merchants; its history reflects how trading wealth, silk-making and paper manufacturing shaped this Alpine town.

What to notice

The museum is organised on themed floors — Accoglienza (welcome), Bellezza (beauty), Talento (talent) and Dedizione (dedication) — rather than a strict timeline. Each pairs civic art collections with objects and documents from the city's earliest phases, through the age of silk, into modern times. The museum's stated method is to tell Rovereto "through the voices and faces of its protagonists"; recorded voices of local figures and interactive stations connect the palace's history to the city around it. The palace itself is an eighteenth-century residence that passed through several owning families before the municipality acquired it.

Context and history

Palazzo Sichardt was built in the 1700s by the Sichardt family, merchants from Nuremberg, and later took the names of the Scopoli and Jacob families, founders of the city's paper mill — the industry whose former works now house the Teatro alla Cartiera. From its construction until 1910 the palace changed hands repeatedly, when the Municipality of Rovereto finally purchased it. In 1939 the podestà granted the building to the Museo Civico, which opened its offices and exhibitions there in 1942 and remained until 1995, when the museum moved to Palazzo Parolari. A restoration begun in 2014 returned the palace to public use, and in 2019 it reopened as the Museo della Città, completing the Fondazione Museo Civico's two-venue layout: sciences and archaeology in one palace, the story of the city in the other.