Museo Archeologico di Mantova – Les jeux sont faits
Mantua’s National Archaeology Museum, officially opened in 1998, was set up in what was once the Gonzaga theatre, donated to the state in 1978.
In 2016 Polo Museale della Lombardia set to work on a challenging renovation task. In four subsequent stages, over one hundred and fifty finds, mainly mosaics, marbles and frescoes, were taken out of the storerooms and restored.
At the end of the first stage in this work, in September 2016, the new permanent layout of the ground floor was presented – Mantua: A Roman City – with monumental finds such as the paved road and large mosaic flooring which was unearthed during town excavations.
The surfaces of the exhibition space tripled in size and the Piazza Sordello entrance was opened, having been restored in summer 2017.
In December 2017 the layout of the “Amanti di Valdaro” – an extraordinary Neolithic era double burial section – was completed and with it a first floor section was opened for the first time in April 2018 with prehistoric and protohistoric finds.
In May 2018 a ground floor layout was presented in which a great aedicule monument was repositioned.
Today this museum containing both state and local council owned finds tells the town’s history from pre-history to the Middle Ages via its excavations and finds from the 19th century onwards.
In two years the exhibition space has increased 500%. The museum was thus handed back with a complete layout to the local community and the Ducal Palace on 11th May 2018 after an important collection enhancement commitment on artefacts long hidden away in the storerooms.