Museo Lapidario Maffeiano

The Museo Lapidario Maffeiano, on Piazza Bra, displays Greek, Etruscan and Roman inscriptions in a building designed for the collection. Founded by scholar Scipione Maffei as a public institution, it is among Europe's oldest public museums.

Why it matters

Scipione Maffei (1675–1755) held that what serves the public should be public property. Over more than thirty years he assembled hundreds of inscribed stones, which he regarded as especially direct witnesses to history. Alessandro Pompei designed a permanent building for the collection. Maffei named it Museum Veronense, presenting it as a museum of the city. For more than a century it was Verona's principal museum and a stop on the Grand Tour; Goethe visited in September 1786.

What to notice

The collection is organised by civilization: Greek, Etruscan and Roman sections, alongside a room on the museum's eighteenth-century history. Its inscriptions range from funerary epitaphs to public decrees, with letterforms that change over time. The Greek and Etruscan material documents cultures beyond Verona and, in the Etruscan case, a language still only partly understood. The museum's collections have also been digitised through Google Arts & Culture.

Context and history

The museum took shape in the mid-eighteenth century as the outcome of Maffei's decades of collecting and salvaging inscriptions from Verona and elsewhere. Alessandro Pompei's purpose-designed building on the edge of what is now Piazza Bra gave the collection a permanent home. Its founding principle—that a public institution should hold the collection, rather than a private gallery—placed it among Europe's oldest public museums. The museum remained Verona's principal collection until larger civic museums developed around it; it now belongs to the municipal I MUV network.