Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo occupies the Sala a Crescente of the Palazzo del Rettorato of La Sapienza, inside the University City, with postal address Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome. The public entrance is not the monumental one facing the Piazzale della Minerva: you go in at the back of building CU001, the Rectorate, under the portico. The visit is free and is by reservation only, on Tuesday and Thursday from 10:00 to 17:00, by writing to mvoem@uniroma1.it or calling 06 4991 0228. Guided tours led by the museum's staff cost €40 per group, up to a maximum of 25 people, and must also be booked by email. For groups the museum indicates a minimum threshold of six participants. The calendar of closures, including the summer one that covers the end of July and all of August, and the Christmas one, is published on the museum's website. Metro line B, Policlinico stop (the closest) or Castro Pretorio. Trams 3 and 19 along Viale Regina Elena. Buses 71, 310, 492, 649. From Termini it's about 20 minutes on foot.

The museum is part of the Polo museale Sapienza, the network that coordinates about 20 university museums and collections. If the Near East really interests you, plan to come back to the University City also for the Gipsoteca della Sapienza, which is visited in the same spirit and with the same logistics.

I'll warn you right away about one thing, because it is the reason why many give up and many others are disappointed: this is not a municipal museum with a ticket office, a bookshop and a guard in the room. It is the museum of a university department, the Department of Sciences of Antiquity, and it lives by the rhythms of the university. Two days of opening, mandatory booking, staff who are research staff. In exchange you get something that in big museums almost never happens: whoever accompanies you among the display cases has very often personally excavated the objects you are looking at.

How to get to the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The University City is an enclosure: a quadrilateral closed between Viale dell'Università, Viale Regina Elena, Viale del Policlinico and the railway, with gates that open onto Piazzale Aldo Moro and onto Viale Regina Elena. Those who arrive for the first time go wrong twice: the first time by entering through the wrong gate, the second by looking for the museum in front of the Rectorate instead of behind it. It's worth losing two minutes on logistics before leaving, because the museum opens few hours and it's not worth burning a quarter of an hour of them going around a building.

By metro to the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Line B is the main road. The Policlinico stop drops you on Viale Regina Elena side, right by the north gate of the University City: from there to the Rectorate portico it's a five or six minute walk, cutting diagonally across the campus. The Castro Pretorio stop serves the opposite side, that of Piazzale Aldo Moro, and is convenient for those arriving from Termini with a single change or for those who want to pass in front of the Biblioteca Nazionale before or after. From Termini, which is the central station and the hub of everything, line B runs toward Rebibbia or Jonio: two stops and you are at Policlinico.

A practical tip: if you get off at Policlinico, keep to the right and look for the pedestrian gate on Viale Regina Elena. If you get off at Castro Pretorio, enter through the monumental gate of Piazzale Aldo Moro, cross the large open space with the statue of Minerva in front of you and then go around the Rectorate on the left. The museum is on the other side of the building, under the portico.

Trams and buses to the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Trams 3 and 19 are the most elegant choice and the least used by tourists. The 19 links Piazza Risorgimento, therefore the Vatican area, with Piazza dei Gerani in Centocelle, and in between crosses Valle Giulia, Villa Borghese, Viale Regina Margherita and Viale Regina Elena: this means that from the Vatican you get to the museum without ever going underground. The 3 runs a long cross-city route that touches Trastevere, Piramide, San Giovanni and the Colosseum before climbing back toward Porta Maggiore, the Verano and Regina Elena. Both stop a short walk from the north gate.

Among the buses, the 492 and the 310 are the ones students use most: the 492 comes from Piazza Risorgimento via Corso Rinascimento and Termini, the 310 comes down from Talenti and the Nomentana. There are also the 71 and the 649. In all cases it's best to check the route the same day on the transport company's app, because on Viale Regina Elena and Viale dell'Università construction sites and detours are frequent.

On foot and by car: reaching the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

It's a good 20 minutes on foot from Termini: you exit on the side of Via Marsala, take Via Castro Pretorio, walk past the Biblioteca Nazionale and come out on Piazzale Aldo Moro. It's an urban walk with no monuments, but it has one advantage: you physically understand that the Città Universitaria was built in a piece of Umbertine and 20th-century Rome, not in the ancient center.

Driving is a terrible idea. The Città Universitaria has internal parking reserved for staff, the area around it is paid parking and saturated because of the Policlinico Umberto I, and at peak hours Viale Regina Elena is a single line of ambulances and taxis. If you really have to, look for a spot beyond Viale Regina Margherita and count on 15 minutes on foot. With a fixed-time reservation, the risk of arriving late isn't worth the savings.

Finding the right entrance to the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

This is where people lose the most time. The Rectorate building has the code CU001 and its main facade on Piazzale della Minerva. That facade, with the staircase and the Aula Magna behind it, is not the door of the museum. The entrance to the collections is on the back side, under the portico, in the same area as the student information point and the entrance of the Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina. Ask for the museum at the front desk and they'll point you the right way. But if you have booked, the easiest thing is to agree on a precise meeting point by email when you confirm the appointment.

What the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo is

The Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo is the visible storehouse of half a century of Italian archaeology outside Italy's borders. It doesn't come from a private collection bought on the antiquities market, it doesn't come from a noble bequest, it doesn't come from a seizure. It comes from excavations. More than 30 archaeological missions of the Sapienza, in 15 countries across the Near East, the Mediterranean and Africa, over more than 50 years of campaigns funded by the university's Grandi Scavi fund and by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What you see in the display cases is the part that it was legitimate to bring to Rome: samples, duplicates, study materials, casts, copies. The main original finds stayed in the countries where they were found, as the laws of those countries require and as the ethics of the discipline require.

It's a difference that changes the meaning of the visit. In a classic archaeological museum you go to see the masterpiece. Here you go to see the method. The display cases tell how you get from an anonymous tell to a chronology, how a pottery fragment becomes a date, how a seal impressed on a lump of clay becomes proof that an administration existed. Anyone looking for a spectacular effect will be left empty-handed. Anyone who wants to understand how Oriental archaeology really works leaves with a full head.

The collections of the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo in a nutshell

The holdings are divided into two large collections. The Near Eastern and Mediterranean collection brings together materials from Turkey (Arslantepe), Palestine (Jericho), Jordan (Khirbet al-Batrawy), Israel (Ramat Rahel, Achziv), Malta (Tas Silġ, San Pawl Milqi, Ras al-Wardiya), Tunisia (Cape Bon, Kerkouane, Ras ed-Drek, Areg el-Rhazouani), Pantelleria, Sicily (Mozia) and Sardinia (Monte Sirai), with smaller groups from Cyprus, Algeria and Morocco. The Egyptian and Nubian collection gathers the results of the excavations at Sonqi Tino, Tamit, Arsinoe and Antinoe in Egypt, and of the missions at Jebel Barkal, that is ancient Napata, and at Mussawwarat es-Sufra in northern Sudan.

The current layout organizes all of this into about 30 independent display units, grouped into 12 major themes, for a total of 29 thematic display cases and six platforms. The thread is not geographic and not chronological in the strict sense. It is anthropological. It starts with the first communities that stop moving and arrives at the birth of the city, of administration, of writing, of royal power, of organized religion, of historiography and of literature. In an hour and a half you cross 10,000 years.

Why the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo has copies and casts

The question always comes, and almost always in a suspicious tone: if it's a copy, why should I come. I answer with the trade. First: the 19th- and 20th-century cast is a scientific tool, not a souvenir. A cast taken from a relief before the relief wore away preserves details that can no longer be read on the original today. Second: many of the regions these materials come from have gone through devastating wars in the last 15 years. Copies and study documentation are, in some cases, the only known state of preservation of a context. Third: the originals are in the display cases, absolutely, and they are the fragments that no civic museum would ever exhibit because they aren't spectacular, but they are the raw material that history is built from.

A firm opinion: the Italian public has been badly educated, to demand the unique piece and to look down on the series. A museum like this goes in the other direction, and for me that is its best quality. With a group of curious adults, the case of pottery fragments deserves more time than the portrait of a pharaoh, and nobody complains.

The history of the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The history of this museum is the history of two men and a school. The two men are Sabatino Moscati and Sergio Donadoni. The school is the Istituto del Vicino Oriente of the Sapienza, which took shape in the early 1960s and for decades trained most of Italy's Orientalist archaeologists. The museum was born inside the Institute, as a tool for teaching and research, and it grew with the missions: every campaign brings study material to Rome, and every piece of study material asks for a display case.

Moscati, Donadoni and the first core of the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The first significant core was formed in the late 1950s with the two founding missions: Donadoni in Egypt, at Tamit, and Moscati in Israel, at Ramat Rahel. They are two very different men. Sabatino Moscati, a Semitist and historian of the Phoenician-Punic civilizations, is the one who shifted Italian attention from the eastern Levant to the western Mediterranean, showing that the Phoenicians were not only passing merchants but founders of cities in Sicily, Sardinia, Malta and Tunisia. Sergio Donadoni, an Egyptologist, is the one who brought the Roman school to Nubia in the years of the great rescue campaign.

The 1960s were the turning point: new campaigns in Sicily, Sardinia, Malta, Syria and Tunisia. The museum filled up fast and changed nature. From a collection supporting teaching it became a three-dimensional archive of Italian research abroad, and that is its identity still today.

The location on Via Palestro and the Ebla room

For about 30 years the museum was located on Via Palestro, outside the Città Universitaria, in a university building in the Castro Pretorio neighborhood. The layout was in three parts: a Syro-Palestinian section, an Egyptian section and a room entirely dedicated to Ebla. That room was the jewel of the museum: a sizable collection of pottery fragments from the excavations at Tell Mardikh, copies of cuneiform documents and above all a large model of the city, which helped students understand the topography of a Syrian urban center of the Early Bronze Age.

Those who frequented the old location remember it with affection and a bit of melancholy. It was a hallway museum, with the display cases pushed against the walls and typewritten labels, and nobody went in by chance. But it had a rare merit: it was the place where a first-year student could pick up a real fragment, under supervision.

The 2014 move and the Sala a Crescente

In July 2014 the museum left Via Palestro and moved inside the Città Universitaria, into the Sala a Crescente of the Rectorate Palace designed by Marcello Piacentini. The name of the room comes from its shape: a space with a curved plan, carved out of the articulation of the building, with a high, even light that is a blessing for the display cases and a nightmare for anyone photographing with the reflections.

The transfer was not a simple change of address. The collections were rethought from scratch and rearranged into about 30 autonomous display units, grouped into 12 major themes. It was on this occasion that the museum took the name it bears today: from Museo del Vicino Oriente to Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo, three words that declare the real breadth of the collections, because Egypt and the Phoenician-Punic Mediterranean had already been inside the museum for half a century but the old name didn't mention them.

Our opinion: the new layout gained in readability what it lost in atmosphere. The thematic sequence works, the panels are written by people who know how to write, and the Sala a Crescente gives the museum an architectural dignity that Via Palestro didn't have. Those who miss the old location miss their own university youth, not the layout.

Who runs the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo today

The direction is entrusted to Professor Marta D'Andrea, an archaeologist of the ancient Near East, with Dr. Claudia Carlucci as area curator. The scientific direction of a university museum is not an honorary post: it means deciding what goes in the display cases, how it is told, which research projects are opened on the materials already held. Those who book a guided visit with the museum staff talk to people who study those materials for a living, and you can tell.

The Città Universitaria that hosts the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

You can't understand this museum without looking at the container. The Città Universitaria was inaugurated in 1935 on a design and under the coordination of Marcello Piacentini, who called a team of some of the most interesting architects of the moment to work around him. The result is one of the most coherent Rationalist university complexes in Europe, built very quickly in a sector of Rome that the ancient center doesn't even touch.

Piazzale della Minerva and the statue by Arturo Martini

If you enter from Piazzale Aldo Moro, you find yourself in front of Piazzale della Minerva, with the fountain and the statue of the seated goddess, a work by Arturo Martini. It is the visual icon of the university, reproduced everywhere, and it has an eventful critical history: Martini, who was one of the major Italian sculptors of the 20th century, was not very satisfied with it, and generations of students have built around the statue a small repertoire of goliardic legends about graduations and exams. Look at it carefully before going into the museum: the relationship between the sculpture and Piacentini's architecture says a lot about how the regime imagined classical culture.

The Rectorate, the Aula Magna and the monumental staircase

Building CU001 is the hinge of the complex. It houses the Aula Magna, dominated by the large fresco by Mario Sironi, and a monumental staircase that in 2025, on the occasion of the 90 years of the Città Universitaria, was restored and reopened to the university community. The museum occupies a portion of this same building: that means that within a few meters you go from the State architecture of the 1930s to the mud bricks of Jericho. The jump is abrupt and is worth the ticket by itself, though there is no ticket, because admission is free.

The Polo museale Sapienza around the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The Polo museale Sapienza coordinates about 20 museums and collections: from the Orto Botanico to the Museo di Zoologia, from the Museo di Anatomia Comparata to the Museo delle Origini. Many of them are inside the Città Universitaria or a few steps away, and almost all follow the same logic as the Vicino Oriente: limited opening, reservation, free or donation-based admission. If you organize yourselves well, you can visit two in one morning.

Within a walk you'll find the Museum of Etruscan and Italic Antiquities, the Museo di Antropologia Giuseppe Sergi, the Physics Museum, the Museo di Chimica Primo Levi, the Museo Universitario di Scienze della Terra, the Museo Erbario and the Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea. A bit farther, toward the Policlinico, there is the Museo di Storia della Medicina. A professional's advice: don't try to binge. Two university museums in one morning are the most a head can take, because they are all dense and none of them is designed for a distracted visit.

The visit route of the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Now let's go in. I'll describe the units in the order that makes the most narrative sense, which is also the order in which the museum arranged them: from the Neolithic to the city, from the city to writing, from writing to empire, then the great Mediterranean drift of the Phoenicians, and finally Egypt and Nubia. Don't expect rooms in the traditional sense: these are thematic display cases and platforms, all in the same curved space, which read like chapters of a book open on the table.

Jericho and the modeled skull at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

You start from the oldest and most dizzying point: Jericho, that is Tell es-Sultan, in the Jordan Valley, the tell that UNESCO inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2023 under the third and fourth criteria, with the name Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan. The site's archaeological deposits cover a span from about 10,500 BC to the Bronze Age, with 29 recognized phases of occupation: it is one of the places where you can materially observe humanity's passage to sedentary life, with a city wall equipped with a ditch and a tower and, in the Middle Bronze Age, defensive ramparts of an innovative technique. The spring of Ain es-Sultan, which gushes right next to the tell, explains why there and not elsewhere.

The museum displays materials from Neolithic Jericho, dated between 8500 and 7000 BC: among them the first bricks, that is hand-modeled mud bricks, and a modeled skull. Stop at these two things, because they are the beginning of everything. The mud brick is the first standardized unit of measurement in the history of architecture: mixing clay and straw, giving each piece the same shape and the same size, letting it dry in the sun. From that gesture descends every load-bearing wall built since.

The modeled skull is another matter. In the Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic the dead were sometimes buried under the floor of the house. After decomposition the skull was recovered, covered with plaster molded to form the features of the face, and in some examples with shells inserted in place of the eyes. Then the skull went back into the house, among the living. It is not a funerary rite in the sense we understand it. It is the foundation of the idea that the dead remain members of the community. In front of that display case it's best to stay quiet for a few seconds. Nothing more is needed.

Arslantepe: the clay sealings and the prince's tomb

The second unit takes you to eastern Anatolia, to Arslantepe, in the Malatya plain, in Turkey. It is the site that the Sapienza mission has been excavating for decades and that UNESCO inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2021 under the third criterion. The tell is about 30 meters high and documents settlements from the sixth millennium BC to the late Roman period. The decisive phase is the Late Chalcolithic, when the palace complex was built. The excavations have yielded exceptional metal objects and weapons, among them what scholars consider the oldest swords known so far in the world. The palace was destroyed suddenly, and the destruction sealed and preserved the rooms in extraordinary condition.

The museum displays materials from Arslantepe dated between 3300 and 3000 BC, and in particular the clay sealings and the grave goods of the so-called prince's tomb, with weapons and jewelry. The sealings deserve an explanation, because they look like lumps of mud and are instead one of the most important documents of antiquity. They are small masses of clay applied to the closure of a container, a sack or a storeroom door, and impressed with a seal. Breaking the sealing meant violating the closure, and the break stayed visible. At Arslantepe thousands of them have been found, thrown away after use. Their presence in such quantity shows that the palace had a system for controlling goods, that is a centralized administration, before writing existed.

This is the point I want you to take home: at Arslantepe administration comes before the alphabet and even before cuneiform. Bureaucracy is older than literature. It is a fact that always splits groups in two, between those who find it depressing and those who find it hilarious.

Khirbet al-Batrawy and the copper axes

Third unit, Jordan. Khirbet al-Batrawy stands in the upper Zarqa valley and has been excavated since 2005 by the Sapienza mission directed by Lorenzo Nigro. It is a fortified city of the Early Bronze Age, founded at the beginning of the third millennium and inhabited between 2900 and 2300 BC, in a hinge position between the basalt desert and the Jordan Valley.

In 2010, during the sixth excavation campaign, the Italian team identified the main building of the city of the Early Bronze IIIB, between 2500 and 2300 BC: the royal palace, which took the name Palace of the Copper Axes because of the four copper axes found inside it. The Roman museum displays materials from Batrawy, dated around 2400 BC, among them the axes.

Why are four copper axes in a palace news? Because in that context copper is not a common tool. It is concentrated wealth, prestige, a store of value. Finding them together, inside the building of representation, means holding the material proof of social hierarchy in a city that 20 years ago appeared on no historical map. Among all the pieces in the museum, the Batrawy axes are the ones that best tell what Italian archaeology does abroad today. Not a purchased treasure, an excavated treasure.

Ramat Rahel and the volute capital of the kings of Judah

Back to Israel, on the hill of Ramat Rahel, between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, one of the founding sites of the Roman school because it is there that Sabatino Moscati excavated in the late 1950s. The museum displays a volute capital from the palace of the kings of Judah, dated to the eighth century BC.

The volute capital, called the proto-Aeolic capital in the archaeological literature, is one of the most recognizable architectural elements of the Iron Age Levant: two lateral volutes curling outward from a central triangle, carved in limestone, crowned by an abacus. They are found in the palaces and residences of the elites of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and their presence at Ramat Rahel is one of the main arguments for identifying that complex as a royal or high-ranking administrative residence.

The motif has a very long descent: from the Levantine volute you arrive, through Phoenician and Cypriot mediations, at the Greek Ionic capital. Looking at that capital means looking at the ancestor of what everyone recognizes on the Parthenon. It is the moment when you understand that the East is not an exotic appendix of European history, it is its premise.

Achziv, Phoenicia and the Simonides Ossuary

Achziv, on the northern coast of Israel, is another of the historic sites of Moscati's school: a Phoenician necropolis with chamber tombs, urns, pottery, and valuable documentation of Phoenician funerary rites on the Levantine coast. From this cultural sphere, and from the Roman-era Levant in general, comes a piece that the museum singles out among its main ones: the Simonides Ossuary, of the first century AD.

Ossuaries are stone boxes, often of soft limestone, decorated with incisions of rosettes and architectural motifs, used in Judea between the first century BC and the first century AD to collect the bones of the deceased after the first burial. Many bear the name of the dead person scratched or painted on the side, in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. It is a practice that lasts about a century and a half and then disappears, and it has left us the richest onomastic archive we have for the population of Judea of that time. An ossuary with an inscribed name is, in a sense, a portable tombstone: the person exists for us only because someone scratched four letters on a stone box.

Ebla, Syria and the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Ebla is the reason Italian archaeology in Syria is known all over the world. The site, today's Tell Mardikh in northern Syria, has been explored since 1964 by the mission of the University of Rome directed by Paolo Matthiae. The identification of the tell with the Ebla named in Mesopotamian texts matured over the course of the first campaigns, thanks to a dedicatory inscription that emerged from the dig. The discovery that changed the discipline came between 1974 and 1975, with the archives of Royal Palace G.

The numbers: the campaigns yielded 17,040 tablets and tablet fragments, which scholars trace back to an original total estimated at around four or 5,000 whole tablets. The texts are in cuneiform script and document a Semitic language previously unknown, Eblaite. Royal Palace G dates between 2350 and 2300 BC. The Mesopotamian sources attribute the destruction of the city to the Akkadian expansion of Sargon, and the question is still debated among specialists. The final destruction came around 1600 BC at the hands of the Old Hittite king Mursili I, and after that date Ebla was never rebuilt.

At the Roman museum, Ebla is present as internal history and as study material: the collection of pottery fragments from the excavations at Tell Mardikh, the copies of the cuneiform documents and the large model of the city that was the heart of the Eblaite room on Via Palestro. The originals of the archives and the main sculptures are in Syria, in the museums of Idlib, Aleppo and Damascus, and this has to be said clearly to anyone who arrives here expecting the authentic tablet under glass. What you see in Rome is the way the discovery was studied, documented and taught. For a student, and for a curious adult, that is not little at all.

Malta: Tas Silġ, San Pawl Milqi, Ras al-Wardiya

The Italian mission in Malta is one of the longest-running undertakings of the Roman school and has investigated three sites that the museum represents in its display cases: Tas Silġ, San Pawl Milqi and Ras al-Wardiya. Tas Silġ, on the hill overlooking the bay of Marsaxlokk, is a sanctuary stratified in an almost didactic way. It begins as a prehistoric megalithic temple, is reoccupied in the Phoenician and Punic period as a sanctuary of Astarte, continues in the Roman period as a sanctuary of Juno and is finally Christianized with an early Christian basilica. Five millennia of cultic continuity on the same spot of ground.

San Pawl Milqi is a Roman rustic villa with installations for oil production, which local tradition links to the shipwreck of Saint Paul on Malta told in the Acts of the Apostles. The identification is tradition, not archaeological fact, and has to be kept distinct. Ras al-Wardiya, on the island of Gozo, is a rock-cut sanctuary overlooking the sea with rooms carved into the rock.

The value of these materials, for those who visit, is comparative: they put Malta at the center of the Phoenician and Roman routes instead of at the margins, and allow you to follow the same material culture from Tyre to Sicily to Sardinia. I recommend lingering on the Maltese pottery fragments with the same eye you would use on a comparison plate: they are the proof that a merchant from Mozia and one from Marsaxlokk used the same tableware.

Punic Tunisia: Cape Bon, Kerkouane, Ras ed-Drek

From Tunisia the museum holds materials from Cape Bon, from Kerkouane, from Ras ed-Drek and from Areg el-Rhazouani. Kerkouane deserves a word more: it is the only Punic city to have come down to us without being rebuilt by the Romans, destroyed during the First Punic War and never reoccupied. Those who visit it in Tunisia walk on an intact Punic urban layout, with houses equipped with bathtubs lined with pink cocciopesto. In the Roman display cases you see the fragments and the pottery classes that make it possible to date that world.

This is where Moscati's intellectual legacy is measured. Before him, Phoenician-Punic civilization in the West was studied as the tail end of Eastern history. After him it became an autonomous field, with its own chronology, its own material culture and its own network of sites from Lebanon to Morocco. The museum declares it through the very geography of its display cases.

Pantelleria and obsidian

A small display case, an object that looks like a shiny black stone, one of the most beautiful stories in the museum. Obsidian is a volcanic glass. It chips with conchoidal fractures and produces blades sharper than metal. On Pantelleria there is an important deposit, and Pantellerian obsidian circulated in the central Mediterranean as early as the Neolithic.

The extraordinary thing is that every obsidian deposit has its own geochemical signature: by analyzing a fragment found in Sicily or in North Africa you can establish precisely if it comes from Pantelleria, from Lipari, from Palmarola or from Sardinia. This turns a stone into a tracer of prehistoric sea routes. Before coins, before writing, before documented sails, there were men crossing the Sicily Channel to go and get cutting stone. If I had to choose one object in the museum to explain to a kid what archaeology does, I would choose this one.

Mozia and the tophet at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Mozia, the island of San Pantaleo in the Stagnone of Marsala, is the Phoenician colony of Sicily par excellence, and the Sapienza has been conducting excavations there for a long time. The museum displays stelae and urns from the tophet of Mozia, dated between the seventh and sixth century BC.

The tophet is the open-air sanctuary of the Phoenician and Punic centers of the West: an area with cinerary urns containing burnt remains of infants and small animals, each marked by a stele. On the nature of this rite the scientific discussion has been open for decades. One interpretive line, the classic one, reads in it the child sacrifice described with horror by Greek and Latin sources and by the Bible. Another line, supported by anthropological analyses of the remains, reads in it a burial area reserved for children who died very young, with substitute animal offerings. The truth probably contains both practices at different times and places.

It is the most delicate point of the entire museum, and it has to be approached like this. It is not dismissed with the joke about cruel Phoenicians, and it is not dismissed with the do-gooder attitude that denies any sacrifice. You explain that the stelae carry dedications to Baal Hammon and to Tanit, that the urns contain individuals of only a few months, and that the interpretation remains a subject of research. An adult audience always appreciates not being sold a certainty that isn't there.

Monte Sirai and the statuette of the ithyphallic god

From Sardinia comes the material from Monte Sirai, the Phoenician and later Punic settlement that dominates the Sulcis plain, above Carbonia, excavated starting in the 1960s precisely within the framework of the research promoted by Moscati. Among other things, the museum displays a statuette of an ithyphallic deity dated to the third century BC.

Ithyphallic figurines in the Punic world belong to the sphere of fertility and apotropaic protection: the display of the male sexual organ serves to ward off evil, not to scandalize. It is the same principle that in the Roman period produces the countless phalluses carved on the corners of houses and on the ovens of Pompeii. In the museum the object is small and discreet and goes unnoticed by those who walk fast. To those who stop, it tells how a Sardinian community of the third century BC defended itself against bad luck.

Cyprus, Algeria, Morocco: the margins of the collection

Finally there are smaller groups, from Cyprus, from Algeria and from Morocco, which don't make a route of their own but complete the picture. They serve to show that the Phoenician network really reaches the Atlantic, and that Cyprus works as a hinge between the Levant and the Aegean for copper, for pottery and for writing. These are the display cases that the hurried visitor skips and that the enthusiast looks at last, more calmly than the others.

The Egyptian and Nubian section of the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The second half of the route changes geography and changes pace. The Egyptian and Nubian collection comes almost entirely from the work of Sergio Donadoni and covers a span from the Protodynastic period to the Islamic age. It is the part that surprises visitors the most, because nobody expects to find Egypt and Sudan inside a Rectorate building.

The Nubian rescue excavations and the Sapienza

In the 1960s the construction of the Aswan High Dam condemned hundreds of kilometers of the Nile valley between Egypt and Sudan to submersion. An unprecedented international mobilization followed, with missions from dozens of countries engaged in excavating, documenting and in some cases dismantling and transporting entire monuments elsewhere. The Sapienza mission led by Sergio Donadoni worked within that framework, and the main sites investigated were Tamit, Sonqi Tino and Jebel Barkal, with campaigns that in the most intense phase are concentrated between 1965 and 1970.

From those campaigns comes the most substantial part of the Roman Egyptian collection, together with the recovery of the church of Sonqi Tino and the work on the tomb of Sheshonq at Thebes. It is worth recalling this because it explains the nature of the materials: not pieces chosen for beauty, but the product of an emergency operation, where you saved what you could in the time there was.

Sonqi Tino, Tamit and Christian Nubia

Sonqi Tino and Tamit are two Nubian churches of the Christian period, decorated with cycles of wall paintings. Christian Nubia is one of those chapters of history that almost nobody knows and that, once told, are not forgotten. Between the sixth and the 14th century, along the Nile south of the first cataract, there were Christian kingdoms, Nobadia, Makuria and Alodia, with bishops, cathedrals, monasteries, a liturgy in Greek, Coptic and Old Nubian, and wall painting of very high quality, with saints with enormous eyes, archangels in jeweled robes, rulers protected by Christ.

The museum displays testimonies of Christian and Coptic Egypt from Tamit and above all from Sonqi Tino. It is the most underrated section of the entire museum. The main frescoes detached during the rescue campaigns are in Sudan, but the material kept in Rome and the excavation documentation are enough to make you understand what that world was. If you come here with only one hour and want to see something you won't find elsewhere in Rome, look at Christian Nubia. At most, for a comparison on Oriental art in the city, you can consider the Museo Nazionale d'Arte Orientale Giuseppe Tucci, which however tells of a completely different cultural area.

The plate of Hotepsekhemui and the Egypt of the origins

Among the Egyptian pieces singled out by the museum is the plate of the pharaoh Hotepsekhemui, first ruler of the Second Dynasty. We are in the advanced Protodynastic period, around the end of the fourth millennium and the beginning of the third, in an era when unified Egypt is only a few centuries old and hieroglyphic writing is still taking its first steps.

The name Hotepsekhemui translates roughly as the two Powers are at peace, and alludes to the reconciliation between Horus and Seth, that is between the two components of the kingdom. A stone plate with the royal name is not an art object. It is an administrative and ceremonial document, the proof that the court controlled the production of prestige tableware and marked it with the name of the king. Look at it thinking that the Near East, in the previous display cases, had just invented the clay sealing for the same purpose. Two different systems to solve the same problem: who guarantees that this thing belongs to the king.

The casts of Tuya, mother of Ramses II

The museum holds the casts of Tuya, mother of Ramses II. Tuya, wife of Seti I, outlived her husband and lived a long time during the reign of her son, who reserved remarkable honors for her: a burial in the Valley of the Queens and the presence of her image in the great Ramesside temple complexes.

Here the discussion about the cast returns. A plaster cast taken from a statue or a relief returns the surface with a fidelity that no photograph of the time could give, and allows you to work on volume, on depth of carving, on traces of workmanship. In European Egyptology schools, for a century, people learned to read style on casts like these. Finding them in a display case, instead of in a storeroom, is a choice of transparency: the museum shows the tools of the trade together with its results.

The pharaoh portraits and the Sheshonq relief

The museum singles out two portraits of pharaohs, one of which is wooden, and a copy of the Sheshonq relief. Sheshonq was a very high dignitary of the 26th Dynasty, holder of one of the largest tombs of the Theban necropolis. His burial, in the Assasif, belongs to that extraordinary season of monumental rock-cut tombs that the great Saite officials had built next to the temples of Deir el-Bahari.

The 26th Dynasty, that of the rulers of Sais between the seventh and sixth century BC, is the moment when Egypt deliberately looks at its own past and quotes it: Saite reliefs take up models of the Old Kingdom with an almost philological exactness. It is a learned archaism, not a lack of ideas. A wooden portrait of a pharaoh, then, is a rarity in itself, because wood in Egypt survives only in particular environmental conditions and in dry tombs.

Antinoe and Arsinoe: Greek, Roman and late antique Egypt

Antinoe, the Antinoupolis founded by the emperor Hadrian on the eastern bank of the Nile in 130 AD in memory of the young Antinous drowned in the river, is one of the great cities of Roman and late antique Egypt. The museum holds very rich materials from Antinoe: funerary goods, pottery fragments, frescoes, elements of architectural works, lamps, oinochoai and coins of the first century AD.

The appeal of Antinoe is that three worlds live together there: the Greco-Roman urban layout with its colonnades, the Egyptian population with its funerary rites, and then Coptic Christianity with its monasteries and its textiles. The textiles of Antinoe in particular are famous all over the world: the dryness of the soil preserved tunics, embroideries, polychrome decorations that are found today in the major European museums. Arsinoe, in the Fayyum, belongs to the same cultural horizon and is the center from which thousands of documentary papyri come.

An observation: the objects of Roman Egypt are the ones the Italian public looks at with the most distraction, because they don't match the image of the Egypt of the pharaohs that we carry with us from childhood. They are instead the most useful for understanding how a province of the empire really worked, and how little antiquity resembles the thematic signs we stick on it.

Jebel Barkal and the palace of Natakamani

Jebel Barkal, in Sudan, is the sacred mountain that rises next to ancient Napata, at the fourth cataract of the Nile. For the Egyptians of the New Kingdom it was the southern residence of Amun. For the Kushite rulers it became the religious center of the kingdom. The Italian mission has worked there without interruption for more than 30 years: begun in 1973 under the direction of Sergio Donadoni, continued by Alessandro Roccati from 1989 to 2004, and subsequently passed on to other Italian universities.

The main building brought to light by the mission is the palace labeled B1500, attributed to King Natakamani: a monumental square-plan construction 61 meters on a side, set on a mud-brick platform, preserved to a height of about two meters, with four monumental entrances and a complex articulation of rooms around a central hall. The dating to the first century AD was refined in 1984 by the discovery of a stele inscribed in Meroitic naming Amanitore and Arikhankharer, wife and son of Natakamani.

The excavations yielded stone lintels, cornices and capitals, glazed tiles and sandstone lion statues that guarded the entrances. The museum displays the lion statue and other materials from the palace. The lion, in the Meroitic sphere, refers to Apedemak, the lion-headed god of war and fertility who is one of the few great truly Nubian deities, with no Egyptian counterpart. If you are looking for a reason to understand why Meroe is not a provincial copy of Egypt, that lion explains it better than 10 pages.

Mussawwarat es-Sufra

Among the Sudanese sites represented in the collection there is also Mussawwarat es-Sufra, the great Meroitic complex in the steppe of the Butana, with its labyrinth of corridors, enclosures and ramps that archaeologists call the Great Enclosure, and with the temple of Apedemak decorated in relief. It is a place that keeps resisting interpretation: pilgrimage sanctuary, elephant training center, seasonal royal residence, and none of the hypotheses has so far prevailed definitively. It is the proof that in archaeology there are still open questions as big as a city block.

Cuneiform writing explained at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

If there is one thing this museum lets you understand better than any other place in Rome, it is what cuneiform writing really is. Not a mysterious alphabet, not a secret code: a technological system, born from a practical problem and perfected over three millennia.

How cuneiform was born

The starting point is bookkeeping. In fourth-millennium Mesopotamia, in the great temples and palaces, quantities had to be recorded: head of cattle, measures of barley, jars of oil, days of work. The first systems used clay tokens of different shapes, enclosed in sealed spherical envelopes. Then someone had the idea of impressing the sign of the contents on the envelope, and at that point the envelope became superfluous. The tablet remained.

The sign is made by pressing a reed stylus with a triangular cross-section into fresh clay. The pressure produces a wedge-shaped impression, wide on one side and sharp on the other: hence the name, from the Latin cuneus. By combining wedges in vertical, horizontal and oblique positions, hundreds of signs are built. Then the tablet is left to dry, and if it needs to be kept for a long time it is fired. It is the most beautiful paradox of the discipline: the ancient archives survived precisely thanks to the fires that destroyed the palaces, because the fire baked the tablets and made them indestructible.

From pictogram to syllable

At the beginning the signs are drawings: the head of an ox means ox. Then the rebus principle comes in, when a sign begins to stand not for its meaning but for the sound of its name. From there the system becomes mixed, with logographic signs that stand for a whole word, syllabic signs that stand for a sound, and unpronounced determinatives that tell the reader the category of the word that follows: deity, man, city, wood, metal object.

This explains why cuneiform, invented for Sumerian, could be adapted to completely different languages: Akkadian, Semitic. Eblaite, also Semitic. Hittite, Indo-European. Elamite. Urartian. Like a Latin alphabet used to write Turkish, Vietnamese and Polish. What always surprises visitors is the duration: cuneiform writing remains in use for more than 3,000 years, and the last dated tablet we know is an astronomical text of the first century AD.

The tablets of Ebla and what they say

The archives of Ebla are important for three reasons, and it's worth listing them in order. The first is linguistic: they yielded Eblaite, a previously unknown Semitic language, and this forced a rewriting of the map of the Semitic languages of the third millennium. The second is historical: the texts document an autonomous Syrian power, with its own network of diplomatic and economic relations, in an era when inland Syria was thought to be a periphery of Mesopotamia. The third is administrative: most of the documents concern textiles, metals, rations, supplies, shipments. Not epic poetry, bookkeeping. Great civilizations tell their story with shopping lists, and to me this has always seemed more moving than any poem.

At the museum you see the copies of the Eblaite cuneiform documents together with the pottery material. Those who expected the original tablet are disappointed for 10 seconds. Then, if they have a good guide, they understand that a well-made study copy serves to read the sign, and that the sign is all that matters.

Cylinder seals and clay sealings

The other Mesopotamian invention that the museum lets you understand is the cylinder seal: a small cylinder of hard stone, often two or three centimeters, carved in negative, pierced lengthwise to be worn at the neck or wrist. It is rolled over fresh clay and leaves a continuous impression, theoretically infinite, with a scene in relief.

The seal is at once signature, identity document and miniature work of art. The engraved scenes are an extraordinary iconographic repertoire: banquets, fights between heroes and animals, processions before a deity, presentations of the worshipper by an intercessor god. Many seals also bear an inscription with the owner's name and function. For the archaeologist a seal, or rather its impression on a clay sealing, is a signature on a document: it says who authorized that movement of goods and at what moment.

Practical tip for the visit: ask to look at the clay sealings with a magnifying glass, if the staff allows it. To the naked eye they look like insignificant fragments. Enlarged, they give back the impressed scene. It's the moment when the museum transforms for the person looking at it.

A museum that is also a laboratory: research at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

One thing that distinguishes a university museum from a civic museum: here the collections are not still. They are active research material, and every year someone puts them back into question. The museum declares some lines of ongoing work, and they are the ones that best explain what it's for to keep thousands of apparently mute fragments.

The pottery project

Since 2015 a study of the earliest pottery has been active, conducted with mineralogical-petrographic investigation and geochemical characterization of the vessels, on materials from Tell es-Sultan and Bethlehem in Palestine, from Khirbet al-Batrawy in Jordan and from Mozia in Sicily. In plain words: you take a fragment, cut a thin section from it, observe it under a polarizing microscope and identify the mineral inclusions of the fabric. From there you trace back the starting clay, then the geological basin, then the place of production. A fragment of a vessel becomes proof of trade or of self-production.

Tracking Red Slip

A second line of research investigates the composition of the slips of the burnished red pottery spread across the Mediterranean in the first millennium BC, in collaboration with Italian and foreign universities. Red slip is the shiny red surface that characterizes whole classes of Phoenician tableware. Understanding how it was obtained, with which oxides and at what firing temperatures, means distinguishing workshops and following the spread of a technique along the routes. It is work invisible to the public and decisive for the discipline.

Archaeometry of metals

Since 2017 the museum's collection has been the subject of archaeometric analyses on the metal finds, to determine the composition of the alloys and the production technologies. In the case of the Batrawy axes, for example, knowing the percentage of copper and any impurities makes it possible to hypothesize the provenance of the ore and the operational chain. The display cases, in short, are also a storehouse of data that nobody had yet extracted when those objects were excavated.

Workshops, lectures and educational activities

Alongside the guided visits the museum offers playful educational workshops, lectures and seminars. It is the public face of an institution that was born for university teaching and that in recent years has opened up to schools and families. The activities don't have a fixed calendar like a civic museum: they are scheduled and announced on the museum's official website. Those with school-age children would do well to keep an eye on it, because a workshop on cuneiform writing, with clay and a stylus in hand, is worth 10 classroom lectures.

A curiosity about the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The last curiosity is about the name of the room. The museum occupies the Sala a Crescente of the Rectorate Palace, and that name is not a poetic whim: it describes the geometry of the space, carved out of the curved articulation of the building designed by Marcello Piacentini in the 1930s. A museum of Oriental archaeology housed inside one of the most studied regime architectures in Italy is already a fascinating contradiction in itself. But the real curiosity comes next.

Until July 2014 the museum was not here. For about 30 years it was located on Via Palestro, with a layout in three parts: a Syro-Palestinian section, an Egyptian section and a room entirely dedicated to Ebla, with a large model of the Syrian city and the copies of the cuneiform tablets. When the university had to leave that location, the collections were packed up and transferred inside the Città Universitaria, and the occasion was used to redo everything from scratch. It was then that the museum changed its name: from Museo del Vicino Oriente to Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo.

Here is the real curiosity, the one almost nobody knows: the name change did not add a single object to the collection. Egypt had been inside the museum since the 1950s, thanks to Sergio Donadoni and the Tamit mission. The Phoenician-Punic Mediterranean had been inside since the 1960s, thanks to Sabatino Moscati and the campaigns across Sicily, Sardinia, Malta and Tunisia. Simply, for half a century the name of the institution had told only a third of it. The museum had to move to realize what it really was.

There is a second curiosity inside the first, and it concerns how the layout was rethought. They chose neither a chronological order nor a geographic order. They chose 12 major themes, articulated in about 30 independent display units, 29 display cases and six platforms. The result is that in the same unit you can find materials 5,000 kilometers and 3,000 years apart, placed together because they answer the same question: how a city is born, how a good is controlled, how a dead person is buried, how a number is written. For an audience used to rooms by dynasty, it is a healthy disorientation.

The last one remains, the most curious. The museum's Egyptian collection was formed in very large part thanks to the rescue excavations conducted in the 1960s because of the construction of the Aswan Dam. It means that a considerable part of what you see in Rome exists in a display case because it was about to end up underwater. The Nubia submerged by Lake Nasser is the great archaeological graveyard of the 20th century, and in this museum a piece of its memory is kept.

Something nobody tells you about the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

What nobody tells you is practical in nature and radically changes how the visit turns out: here you don't enter, you are received. The reservation is not a bureaucratic formality like in the state museums, where you book a time slot and then enter among 200 people. Here the reservation materially opens a door that otherwise stays closed, and whoever welcomes you knows in advance who you are, how many you are and why you are coming. If in the reservation message you write that you are interested in Christian Nubia, or that you are a group of history teachers, or that you are preparing an exam in Phoenician-Punic archaeology, the visit that will be offered to you will be different. It is not a favor. It is the normal functioning of a university museum, and almost nobody takes advantage of it.

The second thing nobody tells you concerns the numbers. For groups the museum indicates a minimum threshold of six people and a maximum of 25 for the guided visit, which costs €40 per group. Do the math: 25 people means €1.60 each for a visit led by someone who knows those materials for a living. In a city where a standard guided visit costs 10 times as much and is led by someone who learned the script the week before, this is the least advertised cultural opportunity in Rome. If there are two or three of you and you want the guided visit, the solution is to team up with others: a cultural association, a class, a group of friends.

Third thing, and it concerns the relationship between the museum and the rest of the city. Many people think university museums are reserved for students. That's not so: access is open to the public, free, and the only conditions are the reservation and respect for the opening days. The misunderstanding comes from the fact that these museums have no communication budget, run no campaigns, and don't appear in the lists of Rome's museums that circulate online. They live on word of mouth and on active research by the visitor.

Fourth, and I say it with some bluntness because people ask me constantly: you won't find the mummy here. There is no spectacular Egyptian hall with sarcophagi lined up and raking light. Whoever is looking for that experience has to travel to Turin or cross the Tiber to the Vatican museums. Whoever instead wants to understand how knowledge about the ancient East is built, and wants to do it in an hour and a half inside a 1930s building a stone's throw from Termini, has found the right address. Both things are legitimate. Confusing them only produces disappointment.

Fifth and last: the calendar. It opens on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 10:00 to 17:00, and there are long closures that don't exist in civic museums, because the museum follows the academic calendar. The summer closure covers the end of July and all of August. The Christmas one runs from mid-December to early January. If you are planning a visit to Rome for August, the museum is not in your plans, and there is no way around it: it's best to know before buying the train ticket.

The advice I give you for visiting the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The main piece of advice is just one and I put it at the top: write the reservation email as if you were asking a colleague for an appointment, not as if you were filling out a form. Say how many of you there are, on what date and in what time slot you would like to come between 10:00 and 17:00 on a Tuesday or Thursday, and above all what you are interested in. Ask if a guided visit is possible and specify if you prefer a general or a thematic approach. This museum answers people, and the quality of the answer depends on the quality of the question.

Second piece of advice: give the museum the time it deserves, which is not what it is usually given. A quick walk past the display cases is over in 40 minutes and leaves you with the feeling of having seen a lot of fragments. A visit done well takes an hour and a half, and with a museum guide you easily get to two hours. If you only have time for one thing, sacrifice the final part and not the beginning: the first display cases, those on Jericho and Arslantepe, contain the concepts that make everything else understandable.

Third: prepare a little. You don't need a course in Assyriology, you need three notions. What a tell is, that is an artificial hill formed by the accumulation of layers of villages built one on top of another over millennia. What Early Bronze, Middle Bronze and Iron Age mean in Levantine chronology. And that cuneiform is a writing technique, not a language. With these three keys in your pocket the museum opens up. Without them, it remains a sequence of brown objects inside cases.

Fourth, and it concerns the order of the day. Since the museum opens only on Tuesdays and Thursdays and only in the morning and early afternoon, it's best to fit it in with something nearby. The best combination: museum at 10:00, leave around noon, quick lunch in the San Lorenzo area, and in the afternoon the Oriental or epigraphic section of a large state museum for comparison, for example at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme or at the Terme di Diocleziano, which are 10 minutes away by subway. It's a day that connects two opposite ways of doing a museum and makes you understand both.

Fifth and last, a piece of advice that counts as a firm opinion: don't bring a child under 10 without a booked educational workshop. The display cases alone won't hold them, and you'll spend the hour chasing them instead of reading the panels. With a workshop, instead, an eight-year-old leaves here knowing how to write their own name in cuneiform and never forgets it. It's the right museum for a kid, as long as you arrive with the right activity.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

The well-known fact is that Italian archaeologists have excavated half of the Near East. Everyone knows it, vaguely, and takes pride in the primacy without going to see what it means in concrete terms. The rarely cited fact is the one that follows: the reason this museum displays copies and casts next to originals is not a shortcoming, it is a legal and ethical achievement of the 20th century.

Throughout the 19th century and for a good part of the early 20th, the rule in the Mediterranean and in the East was the division of finds: whoever financed the excavation took home a share of the discoveries. That is how the great European Oriental collections were formed. Then, over the course of the 20th century, the states of the Near East and Africa passed laws banning the export of archaeological heritage, and the international scientific community adopted the rule as its own. Today a foreign mission excavates, studies, publishes, restores, trains local personnel, and leaves everything on site.

The Roman museum states this principle explicitly: the exhibited finds are partly originals and partly copies, and the copies are there because the originals must stay in the countries where they were found. It is a dry sentence that contains a revolution. If 20 years ago a museum had written something like that in a gallery, it would have caused a debate. Today it is the norm of the discipline, and whoever contests it finds themselves on the wrong side of history.

There is, however, a less consoling flip side, and it has to be said. The wars in Syria and Iraq, the conflict in Sudan, the instability in Libya and in other areas have hit archaeological heritage hard in exactly the years when the principle of returning finds to their original context was gaining ground. Looted museums, bombed sites, emptied storerooms. In some cases the documentation kept in European universities, the casts, the excavation photographs, the drawings, the models, the study fragments, represent today the only known state of a context that no longer exists on the ground. This museum, with its collection of fragments and reproductions, is also a safety archive. It is not a role that anyone wanted. It is a role that recent history has assigned to it.

The second well-known and rarely cited fact concerns the numbers of Italian research. More than 30 archaeological missions in 15 countries, for more than 50 years, financed by the university's Grandi Scavi fund and by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. These are figures that no ministry of culture trumpets and that no communication campaign tells. Yet archaeology is, together with restoration, the sector in which Italy exercises abroad its most solid and least talked-about cultural influence. A museum of four rooms inside a rectorate is its account.

The right photo to take at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

First a technical warning, because here photography is a real challenge. The Sala a Crescente has high, diffuse light and the display cases have large panes of glass: the result is that every frontal shot brings home the reflection of the window, of the ceiling and often of the photographer too. The flash is useless as well as discouraged, because it bounces off the glass and erases the object. Before shooting, ask the staff if and how you can photograph: in a museum by reservation, the courtesy of asking is the minimum rule.

The right photo, the one worth the trip, is not the isolated piece. It's the oblique shot that holds together the display case and the curve of the room: you put the camera at 45 degrees to the glass, lower your eye height by a hand's breadth and let the curved wall into the frame in the background. In one stroke you get the ancient object and the 1930s architecture that contains it. It is the photograph that tells this museum better than any close-up, because the real subject is precisely the meeting of two very distant worlds.

If you want the detail instead, here are three subjects. The first is the modeled skull of Jericho: photograph it at three-quarters and not head-on, because the face reconstructed in plaster gains volume only with light from the side. The second is the clay sealings of Arslantepe: here you need the macro, and you need patience, because the impression of the seal emerges only if the light comes in raking. The third is the volute capital of Ramat Rahel, which asks for a frontal, symmetrical shot, the opposite of everything else.

Outside the museum, the best photo is taken without going in. Step out onto Piazzale della Minerva and frame the statue by Arturo Martini with the facade of the Rectorate behind it: it is the most recognizable image of the Città Universitaria and works beautifully in the light of late afternoon, when the travertine takes on a warm tone. Whoever wants a less obvious composition should stand under the portico and use the columns as a frame, leaving the statue small at the end of the perspective.

One last recommendation that almost nobody follows: put the phone away for the first 20 minutes. In a museum of fragments, photography becomes an excuse not to look. The skull of Jericho is 9,000 years old. You can give it 30 seconds of attention without a screen.

Some important events that happened here in history

A young museum doesn't have centuries of chronicle behind it, but its history coincides with that of some of the most important archaeological undertakings of 20th-century Italy, and the place that hosts it has a story of its own. I'll tell the facts in order.

1935: the inauguration of the Città Universitaria

The building that houses the museum was born with the Città Universitaria, inaugurated in 1935 on a design and under the coordination of Marcello Piacentini. It was a very fast and politically charged construction site: the regime wanted a modern, monumental and rational campus, and got it. The Rectorate Palace, with the Aula Magna dominated by the large fresco by Mario Sironi, is its fulcrum. After 90 years, in September 2025, the university celebrated the anniversary of the complex by giving back to the community the restored monumental staircase.

Late 1950s: the first missions of Donadoni and Moscati

The first core of the museum was formed with two almost contemporary campaigns: Sergio Donadoni excavates at Tamit, in Egypt. Sabatino Moscati at Ramat Rahel, in Israel. These are the two missions that founded the school and that, without knowing it, also founded the collection. At the beginning of the 1960s the Istituto del Vicino Oriente of the Sapienza was born, and the museum was born inside it.

1960s: the Nubian rescue campaign

The construction of the Aswan High Dam endangers the heritage of the Nile valley between Egypt and Sudan and produces the largest emergency archaeology operation ever attempted. The Sapienza mission led by Donadoni works within that framework, and in the second half of the decade its main sites are Tamit, Sonqi Tino and Jebel Barkal. From there comes the most substantial part of the museum's Egyptian and Nubian collection, including the recovery of the church of Sonqi Tino.

1964: Ebla begins

The mission of the University of Rome directed by Paolo Matthiae begins exploring Tell Mardikh in northern Syria. It is the start of the undertaking that would give the Sapienza a worldwide reputation and bring to the museum its most famous room.

1973: the Sapienza at Jebel Barkal

The mission at Jebel Barkal starts in Sudan, under the direction of Sergio Donadoni, conceived as a long-term research project. Donadoni leads it until 1989, then the direction passes to Alessandro Roccati until 2004. It is one of the most durable Italian undertakings abroad, and it brings to light the palace B1500 of King Natakamani.

1974-1975: the royal archives of Ebla

In Royal Palace G at Ebla the archives of cuneiform tablets emerge: 17,040 tablets and fragments, in a previously unknown Semitic language, Eblaite. It is the discovery that rewrites the history of third-millennium Syria and enters the textbooks of the whole world. The Eblaite room of the museum, in Via Palestro location, was born as a direct consequence of that find.

1984: the Meroitic stele of Jebel Barkal

At Jebel Barkal a stele inscribed in Meroitic is found, naming Amanitore and Arikhankharer, wife and son of Natakamani. It is the document that makes it possible to date the great palace excavated by the Italian mission to the first century AD, and to attribute it with certainty to that ruler.

2010: the copper axes of Batrawy

During the sixth excavation campaign at Khirbet al-Batrawy, in Jordan, the Sapienza mission directed by Lorenzo Nigro identifies the royal palace of the city of the Early Bronze IIIB and finds four copper axes in it. The building takes the name Palace of the Copper Axes, and the axes enter among the main pieces of the Roman museum.

July 2014: the move and the new name

The museum leaves Via Palestro after about 30 years and moves into the Sala a Crescente of the Rectorate Palace. The layout is entirely redone in about 30 display units grouped into 12 themes, and the institution takes its current name of Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo.

2021 and 2023: two UNESCO recognitions

In 2021 Arslantepe enters the UNESCO World Heritage List under the third criterion. In 2023 it is the turn of Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan, inscribed under the third and fourth criteria on behalf of the State of Palestine. They are two of the sites the Sapienza works on and from which materials displayed in Rome come. For a university museum it is the highest form of indirect recognition: it doesn't reward the museum, it rewards the excavations that filled it.

Who has passed through the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

In a university museum the question of who has passed through doesn't concern emperors and popes. It concerns the scholars who built a discipline, and the artists who built the building. Both lists are first-rate, and neither is known to the general public.

Sabatino Moscati

A Semitist, historian of the civilizations of the Near East and the ancient Mediterranean, Moscati is one of the two founders of the museum. His intellectual contribution can be measured in one sentence: before him the Phoenicians of the West were a minor chapter of Eastern history, after him they are an autonomous field of study with their own chronology and their own material culture. His campaigns at Ramat Rahel in the late 1950s and then the research in Sicily, Sardinia, Malta and Tunisia in the 1960s filled half the display cases you see today. Whoever looks at the stelae of the Mozia tophet or the statuette of Monte Sirai is looking at the fruit of his research program.

Sergio Donadoni

The other founder. An Egyptologist, he brought the Roman school to Egypt and Sudan and created the Egyptian and Nubian collection almost single-handedly. In the late 1950s he excavates at Tamit. In the 1960s he works within the rescue excavations made necessary by the Aswan Dam, with the recovery of the church of Sonqi Tino and the work on the tomb of Sheshonq at Thebes. From 1973 to 1989 he directs the Italian mission at Jebel Barkal in Sudan. 50 years of fieldwork, and a school of students who occupied the Italian Egyptology chairs for two generations.

Paolo Matthiae

Since 1964 he has directed the Sapienza mission at Tell Mardikh, that is at Ebla, and between 1974 and 1975 he brought to light the royal archives of Palace G: 17,040 tablets and fragments, and an unknown Semitic language. It is probably the most important Italian archaeological discovery of the second half of the 20th century. Thanks to him the museum had, in Via Palestro location, a room entirely dedicated to Ebla, with the collection of pottery fragments, the copies of the cuneiform documents and the large model of the city.

Alessandro Roccati

An Egyptologist, he directed the Italian mission at Jebel Barkal from 1989 to 2004, giving continuity to Donadoni's work on the palace of Natakamani and on the sanctuaries of the sacred mountain. The lion statue and the materials of palace B1500 that you see in Rome come from those campaigns.

Lorenzo Nigro

An archaeologist of the Near East, he has directed the excavations at Khirbet al-Batrawy in Jordan since 2005, where in 2010 he identified the royal palace of the city of the Early Bronze IIIB with the four copper axes, and he is also engaged on the sites of Tell es-Sultan at Jericho and of Mozia. Among the museum's pieces that bear his excavation signature are the Batrawy axes, among the most recent and among the most eloquent.

Marta D'Andrea and the current direction

The scientific direction of the museum is today entrusted to Professor Marta D'Andrea, with Dr. Claudia Carlucci as area curator. It is the generation that inherited the collection from the founders and that has the hardest task: holding together conservation, research on the materials and openness to the public with the resources of a university department. Those who book a guided visit should know this: the people who accompany them are not custodial staff, they are researchers.

Marcello Piacentini, Arturo Martini, Mario Sironi

Then there are those who passed through here before the museum existed, and left the container. Marcello Piacentini designed and coordinated the Città Universitaria inaugurated in 1935, and the Sala a Crescente that houses the collections is his work. Arturo Martini sculpted the Minerva of the piazzale, the image with which the university has identified itself for 90 years. Mario Sironi painted the large fresco of the Aula Magna of the Rectorate, a few meters from the display cases with the clay sealings of Arslantepe. Three of the greatest names of Italian art and architecture between the two wars, all in the same building, and almost all visitors to the museum leave without knowing it.

The students

The last category is the largest and the least celebrated. For over 60 years the students of Oriental archaeology, Egyptology and Phoenician-Punic archaeology of the Sapienza have passed through these collections. It is here that they learn to recognize a fabric, to distinguish a vessel shape, to read the impression of a seal. Many of the archaeologists who today direct Italian missions in the Mediterranean and in the East began in front of these display cases, with a fragment in hand and a professor asking them to date it. A museum that trained those who later filled it: it doesn't happen often.

How to really visit the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

How much time the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo takes

An hour and a half is the right measure for a self-guided visit done with attention. With the guided visit led by the staff you comfortably get to two hours, and the time passes without your noticing. Whoever has only an hour has to give something up, and it's best to give up the final part, not the initial one. Whoever is passionate and has studied the subject can stay three hours, and in that case it's best to say so when booking.

The recommended route inside the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The most effective order is the chronological and conceptual one together: Jericho and the mud bricks, Arslantepe and the clay sealings, Batrawy and the axes, Ramat Rahel and the capital, then the great Mediterranean drift with Malta, Tunisia, Pantelleria, Mozia and Monte Sirai, and finally Egypt and Nubia. The display cases are arranged along the curve of the room and allow a continuous route. If you come with a museum guide, whoever accompanies you chooses the order, and usually chooses well.

Do you need a guide at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

I say yes without hesitation, and it's not an obvious piece of advice: in many museums the self-guided visit is more than enough. Not here. The density of information per square centimeter of display case is very high and most of the objects don't speak for themselves. €40 per group is a figure that makes any economic objection ridiculous. If you can't form a group, bring with you from home the three notions listed above and read the panels all the way through: they are well written.

Accessibility of the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The museum is inside the Rectorate Palace, a public university building equipped with elevators and accessible routes, and the entrance is from the portico at the back. Since the visit is by reservation, the only sensible thing to do is to state your specific need in the message, be it a wheelchair, mobility difficulties or assistance for people with sensory disabilities: the staff arranges access and tells you the most convenient entry point. The advantage of a museum by reservation is exactly this: no lines, no crowds, and the possibility of agreeing on everything in advance.

The Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo with children

The museum organizes playful educational workshops and guided visits for schools of every level. With a booked workshop it is an excellent experience from age eight up: the clay, the stylus, the seal that rolls and leaves its impression are tools that any child understands immediately. Without a workshop, instead, it remains a museum of display cases, and under 10 it works poorly. For schools it's worth writing well in advance, because the opening days are two and the calendar fills up.

How much the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo costs

Admission is free, by reservation. The guided visit led by the museum staff costs €40 per group, with a maximum of 25 people. For groups the museum indicates a minimum of six participants. There are no ticket offices, no advance sales, no resellers: you write to mvoem@uniroma1.it and agree on it. Anyone who offers you a paid ticket for this museum is selling you air.

When to go to the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The days are Tuesday and Thursday, from 10:00 to 17:00. The best moment is early morning, right at opening, for two reasons: the light in the Sala a Crescente is more even and the staff has more time. Avoid the closure periods, which follow the academic calendar: the summer closure covers the end of July and all of August, the Christmas one runs from mid-December to early January. The exact dates are published on the museum's website, and should be checked before fixing the visit because they can change from one year to the next.

Who the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo is really interesting for

I say it without diplomacy, because it is a service I render to the reader. This museum is perfect for: students and enthusiasts of archaeology, ancient history, the history of religions and the history of writing. Teachers looking for a field trip with substance. Cultured travelers who have already seen the big Roman museums and want something they don't find in the guidebooks. Anyone with a real curiosity about Mesopotamia, the Levant, Phoenicia, Egypt and Nubia. It is unsuitable for: those who have two days in Rome and want to see the Colosseum and the Vatican Museums. Those looking for a spectacular effect. Those who can't stand reading the panels. Those traveling with small children without a dedicated activity. It is not snobbery. It is helping you not waste a morning.

What's around the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Leaving the museum you are in one of the least touristy and liveliest quadrants of Rome, between the Nomentano neighborhood, San Lorenzo and Castro Pretorio. Within a 10-minute walk you find things that no standard itinerary includes.

The Città Universitaria and the other Sapienza museums

Without leaving the enclosure you reach the Gipsoteca, the Museo delle Antichità Etrusche e Italiche and the other museums of the Polo. If you have a second appointment on the same day, this is the most rational choice, because it eliminates travel.

San Lorenzo and the Verano

East of the Città Universitaria begins San Lorenzo, the working-class and university neighborhood of Rome, with its osterie, its bookstores and its scars: the bombing of July 19, 1943 hit right here, and the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura bears the mark of it in its rebuilt facade. It is one of the patriarchal basilicas of Rome and one of the most interesting early Christian complexes in the city, with the 13th-century portico and the two places of worship fused into one. Next to it opens the monumental cemetery of the Verano.

Toward Termini: the Terme di Diocleziano and Palazzo Massimo

In the opposite direction, toward Termini, are the Terme di Diocleziano and Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, two sites of the Museo Nazionale Romano. The comparison with the Sapienza museum is instructive: two opposite ways of displaying antiquity, one monumental and one analytical. An afternoon at Palazzo Massimo after a morning at the Vicino Oriente is a day worth a university course.

A little farther, to continue the thread

Those who want to continue along the thread of ancient civilizations have in the city the Museo Etrusco di Villa Giulia, where the Orientalizing and Phoenician component of Etruscan culture can be seen very well, and the great complex of the Museum of Civilizations at EUR, which brings together prehistory, ethnography and the East. Those looking instead for a rarer counterpoint can go to the Museo Barracco, on Corso Vittorio, which is the best place in Rome to see Egyptian, Assyrian and Cypriot sculpture next to Greek and Roman in a few rooms.

Quick questions about the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Where is the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Inside the Città Universitaria of the Sapienza, at Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome, in the Sala a Crescente of the Rectorate Palace. The public entrance is at the back of building CU001, under the portico, not on the monumental facade that looks onto Piazzale della Minerva.

How much is a ticket to the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Nothing: access is free. The only possible expense is the guided visit led by the staff, €40 per group of up to 25 people.

Do you need to book to visit the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Yes, always. The visit is possible only by reservation, by writing to mvoem@uniroma1.it or calling 06 4991 0228. Without a reservation you don't get in.

What are the opening hours of the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Tuesday and Thursday, from 10:00 to 17:00, by reservation. On other days the museum does not receive the public.

Is the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo open in August

No. The museum observes a summer closure that covers the end of July and the whole month of August, and a Christmas closure between mid-December and early January. The precise dates are published on the museum's official website and it's best to check them before planning the trip.

How long the visit to the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo lasts

An hour and a half for a self-guided visit done at ease, two hours with the guided visit. Those in a hurry get by in 40 minutes, but miss the best part.

Can you visit the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo alone

Yes, as long as you book. The minimum threshold of six people that the museum indicates concerns organized groups and guided visits. For the individual visit it is enough to agree on the date and time by email.

How to book a guided visit

You write to mvoem@uniroma1.it stating the number of participants, the date and the desired time slot and, if needed, the theme you want to focus on. The museum organizes general or thematic visits for schools of every level, self-organized groups and associations.

How many people can take part in a guided visit

The maximum indicated is 25 people per group. If there are more of you, you need to split into two shifts.

Is the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo suitable for children

With a booked playful educational workshop, yes, and it's excellent from age eight up. Without a workshop, under 10 it works poorly, because it is a museum of display cases and fragments.

Can you take photographs at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The proper thing is to ask the staff on arrival. In any case the flash is useless, because it bounces off the glass of the display cases and ruins the shot.

Is the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo wheelchair accessible

The Rectorate building has elevators and accessible routes and the entrance is from the portico. Since it is a museum by reservation, the best solution is to state the need in the reservation message, so that the staff arranges the most convenient access.

Is there a coat check at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

It is not a museum equipped with public services like a ticket office, coat check and bookshop: it is a departmental museum housed in a university building. It's best to show up without bulky luggage.

Is there a line at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Never. Mandatory reservation eliminates the problem at the root, and it is one of the least considered advantages of this type of museum.

How to get to the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo by public transport

Subway line B, Policlinico stop (the closest) or Castro Pretorio. Tram 3 and 19. Bus 71, 310, 492, 649. From Termini you can also walk in about 20 minutes.

Is there parking near the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Nothing convenient. The internal parking lots of the Città Universitaria are reserved, the area around the Policlinico is paid parking and almost always full. With a fixed-time reservation, the car is the worst choice.

What you see at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Materials from the archaeological missions of the Sapienza in the Near East, the Mediterranean and Africa: Jericho, Arslantepe, Khirbet al-Batrawy, Ramat Rahel, Achziv, Malta, Tunisia, Pantelleria, Mozia, Monte Sirai, and then the Egyptian and Nubian section with Antinoe, Arsinoe, Tamit, Sonqi Tino, Jebel Barkal and Mussawwarat es-Sufra.

Are there mummies at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

No. It is not an Egyptian museum in the current sense of the term: the Egyptian and Nubian section comes from the rescue excavations in Nubia and documents mainly architecture, pottery, reliefs, casts and Christian wall painting.

Why are there copies at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

Because the main originals remain in the countries where they were found, as the laws of those states and the ethics of research require. Copies and casts are scientific tools and, in some cases, the only surviving documentation of contexts damaged by recent wars.

Can you see the Ebla tablets at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

You see copies of cuneiform documents and pottery material from the excavations at Tell Mardikh. The originals of the royal archives are in Syria.

What is the difference between the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo and a state archaeological museum

The difference is the function. A state museum displays works selected for the public. A university museum displays the material with which research is done and taught. Here the value is in the series, in the fragment, in the comparison, not in the isolated masterpiece.

Is the museum part of the Polo museale Sapienza

Yes, together with the other museums and collections of the university, from the Orto Botanico to the Museo delle Origini, from the Museo di Fisica to the Museo di Anatomia Comparata.

Does the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo host temporary exhibitions

Yes, alongside the permanent route the museum offers temporary exhibitions, lectures and seminars linked to its own lines of research. The updated program is on the official website.

How many objects are on display at the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The layout counts about 30 display units grouped into 12 themes, for a total of 29 thematic display cases and six platforms. The number of individual finds is much higher, because many display cases exhibit series of fragments.

Who runs the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo

The direction is by Professor Marta D'Andrea, with Dr. Claudia Carlucci as area curator.

Is the Museo del Vicino Oriente, Egitto e Mediterraneo worth visiting

If you are interested in understanding how cities, writing and administration are born, and how Italian archaeology really works abroad, yes, and without hesitation. If you are looking for a spectacular museum for a family afternoon, no.

Let's close with a thought to take away as you leave the portico of the Rectorate. In this city there are museums you visit to confirm what you already knew, and museums you visit to change your mind. The Vicino Oriente of the Sapienza belongs to the second category, and it belongs to it in an even uncomfortable way: it forces you to book, it opens two days a week, it offers nothing spectacular and it asks you to read. In exchange it gives back something rarely found in Rome, namely the physical experience of standing before the objects with which knowledge was built, and not before the windows of an antiques shop. Write that email, take the B subway line, enter from the back and ask to see the clay sealings with the light from the side. Then tell me if you didn't look at Rome differently for the rest of the day.

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

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