Origin and Perspectives
From Luigi Pigorini’s Museo Preistorico ed Etnografico to the Museum of Civilizations: the history of a museum (1876–2026)

The central section of the exhibition is therefore devoted to the original museographic project: in carefully restored historic vitrines alongside contemporary ones, visitors will find documents (including articles and printed materials that accompanied the museum’s founding and early activity, as well as photographic prints from the 19th and 20th centuries) together with volumes from the museum’s library – including part of Pigorini’s library collection – and archaeological and ethnographic artifacts presented in dialogue with one another. The vitrines on the sides are organized into two distinct areas (Prehistoric Archaeology / Ethnography), which explore the historical reasons for their original coexistence as well as analyzing, at the same time, the complexities that this relationship raises today. In this way, the exhibition reconstructs, from both a historical and a critical perspective, the program with which Pigorini inaugurated the Museum on March 14, 1876, reassessing its museographic principles within the development of archaeological and ethnographic disciplines as well as within contemporary museography debates. The exhibition concludes with a section dedicated to the most recent developments in research – increasingly intercultural, multidisciplinary, and multisensory – and to a form of museography now called upon to engage with the digital revolution, globalization, and the rethinking of the paradigm of the so-called Anthropocene. The aim of the project is not to provide definitive answers but to share with the public a space-time for reflection that may guide the ongoing redefinition of the museum’s mission.

The “Pigorini” Museum was the first nucleus of a museum system that, over time, has evolved into the present-day MUCIV, which today preserves around 2 million artifacts and documents. More than a single museum, MUCIV has become in recent years a “museum of museums” and at the same time a “museum about museums”: a collection of collections, a layered encyclopedia of cultures and natures that not only presents what it preserves but also reflects on the transformations of knowledge that have made such collections possible.

It is no coincidence that the term “civilizations” is used in the plural: a choice that expresses openness to dialogue and comparison among perspectives. In recent years, the museum has therefore embarked on a broad program of rehanging its collections, conceived as a genuine methodological workshop. The aim is not merely to gradually reopen its holdings to the public, but also to reflect on what a museum is today and what role it can, and should, play in the contemporary world. Remembering the central role of the founder Luigi Pigorini thus means looking to the past so that MUCIV–Museum of Civilizations can more consciously assume the task of connecting its historical origins with the evolving perspectives that it welcomes and develops every day. In this sense, a museum of the past becomes a museum that acts in the present and projects itself toward the future.

The scientific conference accompanying the opening – bringing together numerous scholars and experts – forms part of this broader reflection.

This exhibition therefore invites all audiences to enter the museum and engage with its history not as simple spectators but as empathetic co-authors and conscious interlocutors of a museum still in formation and of a history still in progress. Celebrating its first 150 years does not mean, for MUCIV–Museum of Civilizations, simply commemorating its origins, but rather embracing that history as living material, to be interpreted in light of present needs and the responsibilities they entail. It thus presents itself as a museum-laboratory, capable of integrating research and pedagogy, transforming languages and rewriting narratives according to plural and situated epistemologies, building deep and long-term relationships with communities, and expanding accessibility in order to contribute to the well-being of its audiences. It is not merely a place that preserves objects, but one that interrogates the subjectivities expressed through the methods and practices of its own work.

150 years after its founding, the museum does not intend to commemorate its past but rather to seize its founding spirit in order to refound itself once again, holding heritage and transformation in productive tension. To remain as relevant and necessary as the “Pigorini” Museum once was, a museum must continue to reinvent itself, every day.