The Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini in Rome was founded in the year 1876. Its original location was the Palazzo del Collegio Romano. The museum’s collection is spread out over two floors. The second floor is dedicated to ethnography, the mapping of different populations. The second one is dedicated to prehistory.
Museo Pigorini Rome
Address, opening hours and admission
Address: Piazza Guglielmo Marconi, 14 – Rome (tel. +39 06 549521). Opening hours: Tuesdays till Sundays from 08.00 till 19.00. Closed: Mondays, January 1, December 25. Admission: 8 Euros (concessions 4 Euros). The museum is free on the first Sunday of the month. Bus: 703, 703L, 707, 714, 791. Metro: EUR Fermi (line B).
History and description
In 1977 the Ethnography and Prehistory Museum of Rome was moved to its present location, in the EUR district of Rome.
It was founded by the paleonthologist Luigi Pigorini, who wanted to illustrate the different stages in the development of a various cultures.
The nucleus of the exhibition is formed by the 17th century collection of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, while the remainder of the museum can be split up into two parts: ethnographic and prehistoric, to be found on the first and second floors of the Palazzo delle Scienze.
The first floor is divided into three permanent sections, namely Africa, Oceania and “the Americas”. Non-permanent exhibits are dedicated to Asia and the Mediterranean countries.
The historical sector is organized according to the stage of human evolution and to the methods the archeologists used to learn to understand life in these various stages. Everything is explained through reconstructions, scale models and multimedia presentations. The first room highlights the study of the past. The second section deals with the history of mankind. The Paleolitoco section deals with the Old Stone Age. This is followed by a section that shows how man made the step from the village to the city.
The final section of the collection is entitled “A Dive into the Past.” It is dedicated to the ruins of an Old Stone Age village found under Lake Bracciano and excavated in 1989. The place where they were found is called La Marmotta and belongs to the municipality of Anguillara Sabazia. The finds are more than five thousand years old and include ceramics, woven baskets and all kinds of wooden objects. The remains show that agriculture and cattle breeding were already practiced there.