Museo Archeologico Nazionale G. Carettoni

Cassino's national museum keeps the memory of the land before and after Rome: Volscian warriors, the athletes of the late Republic, and the marble of Augustus. Its collections trace the history of the Cassino territory before and after Rome.

Why it matters

The museum named for the archaeologist Gianfilippo Carettoni is where the deep story of the Cassino territory is assembled in one place. The Ministry of Culture, which runs it through its Lazio museum directorate, presents collections that reach from prehistoric and protohistoric material through the Volscian world to Roman Casinum, gathered largely from excavations in the surrounding countryside. Two pieces give the museum a claim on travellers beyond the region. One is the Eroe o atleta di Cassino, a late Republican statue in heroic nudity that embodies the prestige of the ancient city. The other is the sword of San Vittore del Lazio, an iron weapon of the late fourth or early third century BC decorated with eight-pointed stars and bearing an inscription that the ministry describes as one of only two ancient epigraphic attestations of the name of Roma, the other being the Ficoroni cista in Rome's Villa Giulia. A museum in a provincial Lazio town holding an object of that standing is a genuinely rare thing.

What to notice

The sword of San Vittore bears eight-pointed stars and an inscription identified by the Ministry as one of only two ancient epigraphic attestations of the name Roma. The Eroe o atleta is a late Republican statue in heroic nudity. From the Roman city come colossal fragments of a statue of Augustus, recovered with decoration of the theatre's scenic building, connecting the galleries to the ancient city's theatre, where the fragments were found in 1936. The ministry also lists an unusual bone funerary bed from ancient Aquinum, a luxury object of Roman burial practice, and a lapidarium of inscribed stone. Iron Age necropolis material from Carettoni's own digs and Volscian finds from Satricum fill the earlier rooms, so the sequence reads as one valley's biography across a millennium.

Context and history

The museum grew out of the twentieth-century excavations that recovered the Roman city. Carettoni directed the digs that brought the theatre of Casinum to light in 1936, and the museum created to house the territory's finds was built beside the walls of ancient Casinum along the road to the abbey; the destination portal records its opening in 1980 after post-war decades of work. The museum was later incorporated into the national museum system, alongside the archaeological area of Casinum. The museum's formation mirrors the city's recovery after the destruction of 1944: the finds that survived the war and those recovered in its aftermath were given a purpose-built home, and subsequent excavations have further expanded knowledge of the territory. The dedication to Carettoni ties the institution to the man whose spade revealed the theatre whose Augustus it now keeps.