Museo Nazionale Atestino

Este's state archaeology museum holds the material memory of the ancient Veneti, the Iron Age people whose name this town gave to an entire European culture. Inside Palazzo Mocenigo, against the walls of the Carrarese Castle, decorated bronze situle, intact tomb groups and Roman inscriptions trace a thousand years of life along the Adige.

Why it matters

Este was the place where the civilization of the ancient Veneti was first recognized, and this museum is the institution built on that discovery. When a young professor named Alessandro Prosdocimi excavated local necropolis areas in the 1870s and a decorated bronze situla came out of a villa garden in 1879, the finds convinced scholars that an important pre-Roman people had flourished here. A royal decree of 1887 made the collection national, and in 1902 it was inaugurated in Palazzo Mocenigo, the Venetian residence that grew against the castle walls. Today the museum belongs to the regional directorate of national museums of Veneto and is considered one of the most significant collections of pre-Roman material in Italy.

What to notice

The museum's themes include the prehistory of the Euganean Hills, the ancient Veneti, the transition to Roman rule, the Roman period and the town's medieval history, as well as Palazzo Mocenigo.

• The ancient Veneti, present in northeast Italy from roughly the ninth century BC, were remembered by Greek and Roman writers as breeders of racehorses. A foundation myth traced them to Trojans who fled under Antenor. Este, on the Adige route, was one of their important centres.
• Tomb groups kept together: since the early twentieth-century layout, the display has preserved the integrity of grave assemblages and their topographic order, so burials are presented as closed contexts rather than isolated objects.
• Palazzo Mocenigo itself is part of the collection: a surviving wing of the residence the Mocenigo family began constructing in 1570 against the castle's southern wall.
• Medieval and later collections connect the archaeological record to Este, from the castle to Romanesque carvings removed from local churches, including statues once belonging to altars in the town's older buildings.

Context and history

Curiosity about Este's antiquity is old: finds are mentioned in antiquarian works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the great private collections of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — Giorgio Contarini's, Isidoro Alessi's, marchese Tommaso Obizzi's — drew on the town's soil (the Obizzi material was later taken to Vienna). In 1834 Vincenzo Fracanzani established the town's first public collection, a lapidary museum housed in the oratory of Santa Maria dei Battuti inside the convent of San Francesco. The decisive turn came with Prosdocimi, director from 1874: chance finds of richly furnished tombs at Canevedo in 1876, with bronze situle decorated in repoussé, and the famous situla discovered in the Benvenuti brothers' garden in 1879 and donated with all its finds, fixed the existence of a distinct civilization. The Comune bought the castle and Palazzo Mocenigo in 1883, the Royal Decree of 1887 created the Museo Nazionale Atestino, and on 6 July 1902 the museum opened in the palace with a layout that kept tomb groups intact. Successive directors added major pieces — under Adolfo Callegari the well-known gold medallion of Augustus entered the collection — and after a radical renovation the museum reopened in 1984; reinstallation works have taken place in recent years.