At the EUR, around piazza Guglielmo Marconi, the white travertine buildings look at each other from a distance with their rows of identical windows. One of them holds a mask covered in turquoise tesserae, which came from Mexico to Europe a few decades after the Spanish conquest and ended up in the wardrobe of a duke of Florence.
The Museo delle Civiltà is the hardest museum in Rome to explain in one line, because it is not one museum. Since 2016 it has held four together: the prehistory and ethnography of Luigi Pigorini, the oriental art of Giuseppe Tucci, the early middle ages and Italian folk arts. You get there on metro B, and in half an hour you go from the Neanderthals to Sicilian carts.
Six things are worth the journey out here, and before listing them it is necessary to say what state the museum is in, because it is in the middle of a refit that has lasted years.
What really happens when four museums become one?
Let’s begin!
Four museums, two buildings and an open building site
The collections were born separately and in different periods. The Museo Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini opened in 1876 at the Collegio Romano and reached the EUR much later; the Museo Nazionale d’Arte Orientale, named after Giuseppe Tucci, gathers the Italian missions in Asia; the Museo dell’Alto Medioevo and Lamberto Loria’s Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari complete the group. In September 2016 the Ministry merged them into a single institution.
Today the collections occupy two buildings facing the same square, and the ticket is valid for both. The Palazzo delle Scienze, at piazza Guglielmo Marconi 14, holds prehistory, palaeontology, the African, American, Asian and Oceanian collections, plus the early middle ages. The Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari, at number 8, houses the Italian collections.
Now the part you need to know before buying a ticket. Since 2022 the management has been running a progressive rehang, section by section, which reopens spaces closed for decades and temporarily closes others. It means that today’s museum is not the one of two years ago and will not be next year’s, and that a room can turn out to be closed on the day you arrive. Right now, for instance, the rooms of the African, American and Oceanian collections, on the first floor of the Palazzo delle Scienze, are closed until the end of the works, which the museum expects in winter 2026; a rotating selection of their pieces is shown at the entrance, in the display called In corso d’opera. Before you travel, open the notices page on the website: it is the only place where the museum states what is open.
1. The Medici turquoise mask
It is among the most precious pieces in the American collection. The museum’s entry assigns it to Mixtec craftsmen from Puebla or Oaxaca, between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, and takes it to be probably an image of the deity 9 Reed; the museum also presents it as an «Aztec mask», because it belongs to the stylistic tradition known as Mixteca-Puebla, widespread in the Aztec world. It is a wooden support covered with a mosaic of turquoise, shell and mother-of-pearl tesserae, fixed with resin.
Look at it from the front. It is a face with hollowed eyes, nose and mouth, set between the two triangular jaws of a serpent, whose gums are marked by strips of red shell. On the nose it wears an ornament, and on the forehead serpents intertwine with their heads projecting on either side.
How did a Mexican mask get to a museum in Rome?
By way of Florence. It already appears in the inventory of the Medici Guardaroba of 1553-1559, described as a mask «from the Indies» of turquoise on wood, and in all likelihood it belonged to the collections of Cosimo I de’ Medici. It stays in the Florentine inventories until the eighteenth century, passes to the museum of physics and natural history and then, in 1823, to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. There its traces are lost, until Luigi Pigorini finds it forgotten in a crate in a storeroom and in 1880 obtains it for his museum.
The museum presents it as the best preserved of a group of some twenty-five mosaics of this kind surviving in the world. It is a superlative worth reporting with its criterion attached: it is not the most beautiful of all, it is the one that is missing least.
Where to see it today: the American rooms are closed for works, and the mask can be seen only if it is part of the rotating selection shown at the entrance to the Palazzo delle Scienze. If you are coming for it, ask the museum first whether it is on display in that period.
2. The Neanderthal skull from the Circeo, and the wrong story pinned on it
In the room devoted to the Grotta Guattari, at San Felice Circeo, an almost complete skull of Homo neanderthalensis is on show, which scholars call Guattari 1, together with a jawbone found not far away.
It was discovered in 1939 and appeared to lie inside a circle of stones, with the occipital opening enlarged. Alberto Carlo Blanc, who was leading the research, inferred a rite from this: the Neanderthals were supposed to have broken the base of the skull to extract the brain and eat it, and to have laid the rest inside a ring of stones. That reading ended up in the school textbooks of two generations, and if you went to secondary school in Italy you probably studied it that way.
And what if the circle of stones had never been a rite?
In 1989, exactly fifty years after the discovery, a conference held at the Circeo dismantled the interpretation. There is not a single tool mark on the skull: the only marks are hyena teeth. The cave was a den: the remains got there dragged in by animals, and the widening of the opening is post-mortem damage. The circle of stones, examined again, turned out not to be deliberate work.
Stop at this case longer than at the others, because it is the instance of a museum showing a find and the error built on top of it side by side. The room was rehung in December 2025 and tells this story too.
3. The Porta Marina opus sectile
In the early middle ages section there is a whole reconstructed room, and it is the walls that are the work. They come from a building of the end of the 4th century excavated just outside Porta Marina, at Ostia Antica, and they are faced in opus sectile, with slabs of marble cut to form the figures instead of painted.
The assembly you see is the result of a recomposition carried out between 2006 and 2009 on thousands of fragments. There are lions and tigers sinking their teeth into deer and antelopes, and one of the lions wears a studded collar; there are busts inside frames, among them a bearded man giving a blessing with a halo, and geometric motifs. The colours all come from the marbles: giallo antico, serpentine, red porphyry and pavonazzetto. And the date is certain, because in the mortar of one of the panels with the lion a bronze coin of Magnus Maximus was found, emperor between 383 and 388.
Get close to one of the lions and look for the join between one slab and the next. A mosaic uses small, identical tesserae; here every piece is cut to measure for the shape it has to make, and the drawing runs through the veining of the marble. It is an extremely expensive technique, reserved for the richest houses, and this is one of the few surfaces of that kind reassembled in full.
4. The Asian collections of Giuseppe Tucci
Giuseppe Tucci (1894-1984) was the Italian orientalist who led eight expeditions to Tibet between 1929 and 1948 and six more to Nepal, before starting the Italian excavations in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. The material that came back forms the core of the Asian collection, and in 1957 it was the reason Tucci founded the Museo Nazionale d’Arte Orientale, which has now flowed into this one.
You will find sculptures from Gandhara, the Buddhist art born in present-day Pakistan out of the encounter with Greek sculpture, Tibetan thangkas, bronzes, ceramics and the finds from the Italian excavations in the Swat valley. The section is one of those affected by the rehang and opens in stages, so check the notices if you are coming specially for it.
The thing to look at, in the Gandhara rooms, is the faces of the Buddhas. They have the drapery, the wavy hair and the features of Hellenistic sculpture, because those sculptors were working two thousand kilometres from Greece using a repertoire that had arrived with Alexander the Great. Few rooms in the world show so well that a style can travel further than the people who invented it.
5. Italian folk arts, in the building opposite
Cross the square and go into the other building, because almost nobody does and the ticket covers it. Here is the collection Lamberto Loria put together for the ethnographic exhibition of 1911: costumes, working tools, votive offerings, carts, masks, objects from Italian peasant and artisan life before industry.
Among the most recognisable pieces are the Sicilian carts, their sides painted with processions of knights, but the value of the collection lies in the whole. Look at how many different objects a single trade needed, and how local they are: the same function takes a different shape in every valley.
One thing the section states for itself. A collection like this comes into being at the moment that world is ending, and the man who put it together knew it: it does not document a living culture, it documents the last instant in which it was possible to gather it.
6. The Museum of Opacities
The last thing is not an ancient object and it is the reason this museum, right now, is more interesting than its reputation suggests.
Many European ethnographic collections reached their museums by way of colonialism, and for a century the labels did not say so. The management has launched a cycle of displays called the Museo delle Opacità, the museum of opacities, which takes the material tied to the Italian empire, to agriculture and to colonial architecture, and puts it back on show while stating where it comes from and how it got here.
Look around you as you cross the square, because the place makes the work sharper: the EUR was designed in the 1930s for the world’s fair of 1942, which never took place, and it is the district in which the fascist regime wanted to show the world its own idea of empire. A museum re-examining Italian colonialism is doing it inside the architecture that celebrated it.
Practical information
Details checked on 17 September 2026 on the official website, museodellecivilta.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 10 euros and covers all the sections open in the two buildings. The reduced ticket costs 2 euros and is for European Union citizens between 18 and 25; there is also an «amico» ticket at 5 euros. Opening hours. Tuesday to Sunday 8:00-19:00, with last admission at 18:30. The museum stays closed on Mondays. Free admission. Entry is free on the first Sunday of the month. Admission is also free for European Union under-18s, for people with disabilities with a companion, for teachers and students of the faculties listed by the Ministry, for accredited journalists and for European Union tour guides. Closed rooms. The rehang proceeds section by section. On the day of the check the rooms of the African, American and Oceanian collections on the first floor of the Palazzo delle Scienze were closed, until the works end in the winter of 2026; a rotating selection of their pieces is shown at the entrance. The notices page on the website is the only up-to-date list, and it is worth reading the day before if you are coming for a specific piece. Getting there. The two buildings are at piazza Guglielmo Marconi 14 and 8. The metro B stop is EUR Fermi, five minutes away on foot; buses 30, 170, 671, 714 and 791 also stop nearby. Parking in the surrounding streets is free, which is rare in Rome. How long to allow. The six things in this guide need two hours. Make it three if you want to see both buildings at leisure, and bear in mind that from the centre it takes twenty minutes by metro each way.
Where to go from here
If prehistory and the archaeology of Lazio before Rome interest you, the natural route is the Villa Giulia Etruscan Museum, at the other end of the city, where the story picks up from the point at which this one stops.
For Roman antiquity proper the four branches of the National Roman Museum remain the reference, and the opus sectile you saw here comes from Ostia, which you can visit in half a day starting from the Piramide: the guide is in Visiting Ostia Antica. The full map of the city’s collections is in Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: all the images are by Francesco Bini (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons. For the Circeo skull only photographs of casts kept in other museums exist on Commons, for the Asian rooms only images of the old site at Palazzo Brancaccio, and the works of the Museo delle Opacità are contemporary and in copyright: that is why those sections are left without a photograph.
