MArTA — Museo Nazionale di Taranto

The Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Taranto, known as MArTA, occupies a former Alcantarine convent in the centre of Taranto, in the Apulian region of southern Italy, and ranks among the most important archaeological museums in the country. Its collection documents the history of Taranto and the wider Ionian coast from prehistory through the Greek colony of Taras, founded by Spartan settlers in 706 BCE, to the Roman and late-antique periods. The museum's most celebrated holdings are the Ori di Taranto, the Gold of Taranto: an exceptional series of Hellenistic gold jewellery, including delicate diadems, earrings, necklaces and filigree work recovered from local tombs, which together illustrate the wealth and craftsmanship of Magna Graecia at its height. Galleries display Attic and Italiote red-figure pottery, terracotta votive figurines, marble sculpture, funerary stelae and grave goods that trace daily life, religion and burial customs in the Greek city. Reconstructed tomb groups and contextual displays show how objects were found together, while mosaic floors and architectural fragments document the Roman colony of Tarentum. The collection was first assembled in 1887, and the museum reopened after a long restoration in 2016 that modernised the layout across two main floors and introduced a clear chronological route with bilingual labelling, lighting designed to highlight the goldwork, and digital interpretive material. The building itself preserves cloister spaces of the eighteenth-century convent, integrated into the contemporary display. Curatorially the museum moves from prehistoric and Bronze Age material on the lower levels to the Greek and Roman city above, allowing visitors to follow the development of Taranto across more than a thousand years. As the principal repository for the archaeology of ancient Taras, MArTA offers a comprehensive picture of one of the leading cities of Magna Graecia and of the artistic achievements of the Greek world in southern Italy.