Museo Civico di Modena

The Museo Civico di Modena, in Emilia-Romagna, is the city's municipal museum, housed within the grand Palazzo dei Musei, a large 18th-century complex on Largo Porta Sant'Agostino that also shelters several of Modena's most important cultural institutions. The civic museum brings together two principal strands: an archaeological collection and an art and applied-arts collection, presenting the history of Modena and its territory from prehistory to the modern age. The archaeological galleries display material from the Palaeolithic through the Bronze Age terramare settlements characteristic of the Po plain, the Etruscan and Roman periods of the ancient town of Mutina, and finds from the surrounding countryside, including ceramics, bronzes, glass, and funerary objects, alongside an ethnographic and non-European section assembled by 19th-century collectors. The art collection ranges across medieval and Renaissance sculpture, paintings, textiles, ceramics, musical and scientific instruments, arms, leatherwork, and decorative arts that illustrate the craftsmanship of the city under the Este dukes, who made Modena their capital after losing Ferrara in 1598. The Palazzo dei Musei complex famously also contains the Galleria Estense, with the d'Este ducal picture collection, and the Biblioteca Estense, whose treasures include illuminated manuscripts such as the celebrated Bible of Borso d'Este, so the building as a whole is closely tied to the Este library and ducal heritage. The civic museum's curatorial approach is partly chronological and partly thematic, with rooms devoted to particular materials and crafts, and recent rearrangements have modernised the displays. Set within the monumental palazzo, it offers a broad survey of local archaeology and decorative arts that complements the more famous Este painting and manuscript collections under the same roof.