Methodological entrances

Palace of Sciences (ground floor)
Palace of Folk Arts and Traditions (ground floor)

As of 26 October 2022, the Museum of Civilizations is endowed with two symmetrically opposed entrances: to the Palace of Science (Piazza Guglielmo Marconi 14) and to the Palace of Folk Arts and Traditions (Piazza Guglielmo Marconi 8), with the latter being reopened after a comprehensive restoration of the ground floor areas. Both entrances have been reconfigured as a historical-critical introduction to the museum, narrating its different incarnations and aiming to answer the public’s question, “What Museum am I about to visit?”
The two entrances will be periodically rearranged, with each installation delving further into how the museum carries out its research, and the tools for sharing at disposal in its various departments and sections (inventories, index cards, labels, explanatory texts, plans and maps, journals and publications, educational media), thus also revealing how some characteristics of cataloguing are common to the different collections.
Specifically, we will be analyzing how the collections are characterized by their different provenances, and the relationships between the uniqueness and seriality of the artifacts, and how this influences their interpretation. We will be documenting some of the personalities and events from which the collections originate, such as the very early multi-disciplinarity of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s cabinet of curiosities; the role of major encyclopedic exhibitions such as the 1911 Exhibition of Italian Ethnography and the Universal Exhibition of Rome (EUR) of 1942; the collecting activities of 19th-20th century figures such as Evan Gorga and the field research of explorers and anthropologists of various generations and formations, whose archives and collections have come down to us, including those of Enrico Giglioli, Lamberto Loria, Luigi Pigorini, Annabella Rossi and Giuseppe Tucci.