Museo Archeologico Nazionale dell'Umbria

Umbria's state collection of antiquities fills the Dominican convent of San Domenico: Etruscan travertine urns lining a great cloister, the reconstructed Cai Cutu tomb, the enigmatic Cippo perugino, bronzes, coins and Roman inscriptions. The museum presents a major collection of regional antiquities.

Why it matters

Perugia was one of the great Etruscan cities, and this museum is where its buried record is kept and read. Since 1948 the state collections have occupied the convent of San Domenico, whose church complex stands just beyond the Etruscan wall line on Corso Cavour, and the holdings trace the region from prehistory through the Etruscan and Roman epochs to late antiquity. The museum's symbol-piece, the Cippo perugino, an inscribed boundary stone from the city's Etruscan age, gets a room of its own. The Ministry of Culture's regional directorate has documented seismic strengthening and systems upgrades as part of the museum's renovation.

What to notice

The display combines architecture and artefacts. Etruscan travertine urns recovered from the city's Hellenistic necropolises line the cloister and upper loggia, alongside carved facades and reclining figures in stone. In an underground room off the cloister, the Tomba dei Cai Cutu, a family tomb of the third to first centuries BC, has been rebuilt with its funerary furniture arranged as found, and material from the Tomba dei Cacni, recovered through the Carabinieri heritage-protection unit, extends the picture. The collection includes the Cippo perugino, Etruscan bronzes from San Mariano, a coin cabinet and the Bellucci collection of ancient and modern amulets. The collection spans prehistory, Umbrian and Etruscan material, and Roman epigraphs commemorating Perusia restituta after the civil-war destruction, alongside a Wunderkammer.

Context and history

The Dominican order founded its Perugia house in 1233, and the convent's later story mirrors the city's: barracks under Napoleon, a return to the friars after the Restoration, military use again after Italian unification. The move that created the museum came after the Second World War, with the state collections installed in the San Domenico complex from 1948; in 1957 the scholar Umberto Calzoni gathered the scattered civic museum collections here, and they subsequently passed to the State, consolidating the national museum. A renovation launched in 2009 set out to renew the museum's content and layout, alongside structural and systems improvements. The adjacent church, with its immense apidal window, and the cloister provide an architectural frame for the museum complex.