Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions “Lamberto Loria” – Museum of Civilizations

The address is Piazza Guglielmo Marconi 8, in the EUR neighborhood, and the right building is the one with the low colonnade on the south side of the square, not the one across from it. You get there by metro line B, EUR Fermi stop, five minutes on foot, by ATAC buses 30, 170, 671, 714 and 791, or by car, almost always finding free parking on the surrounding streets. Hours are Tuesday to Sunday, from 8:00 to 19:00, last entry at 18:30, closed on Mondays. Full ticket €10.00, valid for all the sites of the Museum of Civilizations. Reduced €2.00 for citizens of the European Union between 18 and 25. Free admission under 18, for people with disabilities and their companion, and for certain categories of students, teachers and journalists. There is an annual card at €22.00 that gives a year of unlimited entries. Free admission for everyone on the first Sunday of every month and on April 25. You don't need to book for an individual visit: you pay at the ticket desk and go up. Booking is mandatory only for groups and school classes. The museum switchboard is +39 06 549521, the public information number is +39 335 7310064, active Tuesday to Thursday between 9:30 and 11:30. The guided visits are run by the cooperative AbIntra, phone +39 375 8323206 and email didatticamuciv@abintra.it.

A warning that weighs on the day more than any other: part of the rooms is affected by reinstallation work, and the visible route changes over the course of the year. If you are coming to Rome from elsewhere to see a specific section, for example the nativity scenes or the processional machines, call the museum the day before. 30 seconds with the switchboard are worth an hour of metro. The ground floor and the first floor remain open in any case and the permanent display is large. The Hall of Honor, which is the monumental space of the building, is periodically taken over by temporary exhibitions and is not always readable as a historic room.

If you want to frame the institution as a whole, with all its sections and its two sites facing the same square, you will find the general picture on the page of the Museum of Civilizations. To understand where you are, and why this neighborhood has the air it has, it is worth reading the page on EUR too.

Where the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions is, and why almost everyone goes to the wrong building

Piazza Guglielmo Marconi has two twin buildings, one across from the other, joined by a colonnaded propylaeum that crosses the square like a hinge. They are so similar that the eye gives up: same height, same travertine, same rhythm of windows. At number 14, in the Palazzo delle Scienze, are kept the collections of prehistory and protohistory, the African, American, Asian and Oceanian ones, the early medieval materials, those of the former Colonial Museum and the paleontology and lithomineralogy collections. At number 8, in the Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari, are the Italian collections: the carts, the nativity scenes, the processional machines, the peasant musical instruments, the puppets, the shop signs.

This is the most common mistake, and it is a mistake that costs 20 minutes of walking and a bit of mood. If you are looking for the Loria, your street number is 8. If you are looking for the Neanderthal skull and the Paleolithic display cases, you have to cross over and go to 14, where the collections that everyone in Rome still calls Pigorini are housed. The ticket is single and valid for both, so the mistake doesn't cost money, it costs time.

Getting to the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions by metro

Metro B, direction Laurentina, EUR Fermi stop. At the exit you take Viale Beethoven or Viale America and climb toward the square: barely five minutes, very wide sidewalks, a minimal slope that you feel only in July. The EUR Palasport stop, the one before, is just as close and has the advantage of taking you past Pier Luigi Nervi's Palazzo dello Sport and the little lake. If you travel with a stroller or a wheelchair choose EUR Fermi: elevators, a step-free route to the portico, regular signalized crossings. A note nobody ever mentions: metro B at EUR runs on the surface and at the exit you find yourself in a neighborhood with the proportions of an imaginary capital, not of a suburb. The first view is part of the visit.

Getting to the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions by bus

The ATAC lines serving the area are 30, 170, 671, 714 and 791. The 30 is handy for those coming from Piramide and Ostiense, the 714 for those leaving from Termini and San Giovanni, the 170 for those moving from Testaccio and Trastevere, the 791 for those coming from Magliana and the San Paolo area. None of these lines stops exactly in front of the door: you get off on Viale Europa or on Viale della Civiltà del Lavoro and walk a few hundred meters. At EUR distances deceive, because the porticoes are all alike and the sidewalks are twice as long as they look on a map.

By car, by bicycle and by taxi to the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions

Street parking around Piazza Guglielmo Marconi is free on most streets, and in the rest of Rome this is a rarity bordering on the miraculous. Two spaces reserved for people with disabilities are in front of each of the two entrances, at number 8 and at number 14. The bicycle works well: the neighborhood is almost flat, the roadways are wide, weekend traffic is modest. The professional's advice is banal and useful: if you come by car, arrive before 9:30, because by mid-morning the offices in the area have already taken every free space. With a taxi, just say Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari, Piazza Marconi 8: Roman taxi drivers know the square for the obelisk, not for the museum.

Hours and tickets of the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions

The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, from 8:00 to 19:00, with last entry at 18:30. It is closed on Monday. The 8:00 opening is a gentle anomaly in the Roman landscape, where almost everyone raises the shutter at 9:00 or 9:30: it means you can do a full hour of visit in a practically empty building, with the raking morning light coming in from the high windows and crossing the display cases of the carts. Whoever knows this museum goes at that hour and doesn't argue.

How much the ticket to the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions costs

Full €10.00. Reduced €2.00 for citizens of the European Union aged between 18 and 25 inclusive, which is the age group most mistreated by Italian museums and here instead gets by with the price of a coffee and a cornetto. Free for those under 18, for people with disabilities and for those who accompany them, for students and teachers of certain fields of study and for journalists on duty. There is also a reduced ticket at €5.00 reserved for those who take part in certain museum initiatives and for holders of entry tickets to the trade fair events of the neighborhood. The point that matters is another: that €10 also includes the building across the way. One ticket, two buildings, about 50,000 square meters between rooms and storage. Whoever limits themselves to one wing alone is paying double without knowing it.

The annual card of the Museum of Civilizations and the free days

The annual card costs €22.00 and gives 12 months of unlimited access to all sites. Do the math, and it pays for itself by the third visit. For those who live in Rome it is the smartest expense you can make in here, and I say it for a precise reason: the folk arts and traditions route is not exhausted in one morning, and with part of the rooms in motion it pays to come back months later to see what has changed. Admission is free for everyone on the first Sunday of every month and on April 25. The first Sunday of the month at EUR has nothing of the crush of the Forums: you go in, you wander calmly, you go out. It is probably the best spent free Sunday in Rome, and I say it after trying almost all of them.

Why you don't buy the ticket online for the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions

The museum has no online sales channel of its own: the ticket is bought at the desk, at the entrance of the building. If you find resellers online promising priority entries or skip-the-line packages for this address, be wary without hesitation. Here the line practically doesn't exist. When it does, it lasts as long as two people ahead of you and a lady looking for change in her wallet. Paying a surcharge to avoid a line that isn't there is the fastest way to give money to an intermediary.

Guided visits to the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions, groups and school classes

The educational service and the guided visits are entrusted to the cooperative AbIntra. On weekends guided routes are offered to individual visitors at a cost of €5.00 per person, with booking to be closed in advance. For groups of up to 20 participants the guided visit costs €100.00, which becomes €120.00 in English. Participants beyond the 20th pay an individual fee of €5.00 or €6.00. The phone contact is +39 375 8323206, active Monday to Friday in the morning, and the email address is didatticamuciv@abintra.it. A blunt opinion: €5 for a guide in a museum of this complexity is a figure out of line with the market, in the visitor's favor. And here the guide is not a luxury. This is a museum of mute objects, tools that nobody has used for 70 years, and without someone explaining what a flail was for or why a hemp brake has that shape, the risk is to cross three rooms with the vague feeling of having seen lumber.

Accessibility of the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions

It is one of the most accessible museums in Rome, and it must be said without beating around the bush because in the city it doesn't happen often. There are elevators, equipped restrooms, wheelchairs available free of charge at the reception desk, two reserved parking spaces in front of each of the two entrances. Tactile routes with Braille texts exist and are being updated as part of the plan for removing architectural barriers that the museum has published. The museum also carries out projects dedicated to elderly people and to people with dementia, built on the memory of everyday objects, which in a museum of material culture work better than elsewhere: a kneading chest, a coal iron, a wooden cradle reopen memories that a painted canvas doesn't touch. The floors are continuous, the rooms wide, the distances between display cases generous. Whoever moves in a wheelchair really gets around here, without the effort one has to bear in many historic buildings of the center.

What the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions holds: the real numbers

About 150,000 works and documents. 500,000 photographic negatives. 25,000 units of books and library materials. These are figures to be read carefully, because they say two different things. The first is that this is one of the largest archives of European material culture, comparable in ambition to the great ethnographic museums of the North. The second is that the visitor will always see only a fraction of it: the exhibition rooms of the ground floor and the first floor hold several thousand pieces, the rest is in the storage, in the photographic archives, in the warehouses. It's not a flaw, it's the physiology of a museum born to document an entire country before it disappeared.

The difference from an art museum is substantial and it is best to make it clear right away. Here there are no signed masterpieces, no altarpieces, no Caravaggio to act as bait. There are objects made by anonymous hands to be used, worn out, repaired and finally thrown away. Their value is not in the signature, it is in the series: 100 sickles from 100 different towns tell a geography of labor that no written document returns. Whoever comes in here looking for single beauty leaves disappointed. Whoever comes in trying to understand how their great-grandparents lived leaves with a full head.

The three thematic areas of the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions

The museum organizes the collections in three large areas, and this division goes back to the museographic rethinking begun in the late 1990s, which replaced the regional layout of the first installation. The first area is called The Land and Its Resources and concerns the relationship between communities and the environment: transport, agriculture, sheep farming, hunting, fishing, crafts. The second is called Living and Dwelling and concerns the home, the furnishings, daily gestures, the cycle of life from birth to death. The third is called Rites, Festivals and Ceremonies and concerns the ritual and festive dimension: the processional machines, the nativity scenes, the masks, the music, the street theater.

The logic is anthropological and not geographic, and it is a choice that has a history. In 1956 the museum opened with an arrangement by regions, child of the 1911 Exhibition of Italian Ethnography: each region its own display case, each display case its own costume. That layout gave back an Italy made of 20 distinct identities, which is exactly the narrative needed by those who had wanted the museum. The arrangement by themes tells something else: that an Abruzzese shepherd and a Sardinian shepherd faced the same problems with related solutions, and that the differences between the forms are variations on a common lexicon. It is a thesis, not neutrality. But it is a thesis that holds, and that makes the visit infinitely more interesting.

The land and its resources: the first area of the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions

It is the most substantial section and, for the visitor who arrives unprepared, the most disorienting. You walk in and find yourself in front of whole carts, not models: real vehicles, with worn wheels and flaking paint, that occupy the space like involuntary sculptures. Then the display cases of tools begin, and that's where patience is needed.

The transport systems of the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions: from human shoulders to Sicilian carts

The route begins with the oldest way of moving things, which is carrying them on your body. Pads of rolled cloth to bear the weight on the head, saddlebags, gerle baskets, back carriers: very poor objects, almost always self-made, that mark the physical limit of an economy. Then transport with pack animals: pack saddles, padding, wooden hooks for hitching loads, harnesses. Then traction: snow sledges and ground sledges, which in Apennine Italy were also used in summer on impossible slopes, and finally the carts.

The Tuscan and Emilian farm carts are decorated with a sobriety that deceives: carvings on the sides, worked ironwork, colors dulled by time. The Roman wine cart has the folding hood, that semicircular structure of canvas and ribs that served the carter for shelter during the night trips from the Castelli toward the city, and that anyone who has seen a film set in Rome in the 1950s recognizes instantly. There is a biroccio from the Marche. And then there are the Sicilian carts, which are a chapter apart.

The museum holds two, one from the Catania area and one from the Palermo area, and the difference between the two types is a lesson in anthropology in five minutes. The Catania cart has higher sides and decoration in panels. The Palermo one has a lighter structure and boards painted with continuous scenes. On the sides are painted episodes from Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and from the Carolingian cycle: Orlando, Rinaldo, Angelica, the paladins of France. An illiterate carter carried around Sicily, on a work vehicle, the same stories that the puppeteers performed in their little theaters and that the storytellers sang in the squares. Chivalric literature had reached the people by oral route and had stayed there for centuries, while in the houses of the gentry Tasso was read in print. If I had to point to a single object that sums up the meaning of this museum, I would point to a Sicilian cart.

Farm work at the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions: plows, sickles, flails

The agriculture display cases follow the cycle of the year and not alphabetical order, and it is the right choice. It begins with plowing, with a series of nail-type and ear-type wooden plows that in their essential form had not changed since antiquity: a stock, a plowshare, a handle. Anyone who has in mind the depictions of plowing on Roman reliefs recognizes the same object. Then sowing, with hand seeders and shoulder sacks. Then the harvest, with reaping sickles and serrated sickles, and with the objects almost nobody expects: the cane finger guards, slipped onto the left hand so as not to cut oneself while grasping the stalks. Details like these say more than a treatise on the conditions of peasant labor.

Threshing is documented by the flails, those articulated sticks with which grain was beaten on the threshing floor, and by the wooden forks and winnowing fans for separating the chaff. Milling is told through models of water mills, which are among the most fascinating pieces of the section because they show the whole mechanism, wheel, shaft, millstones, to scale. Bread making occupies a display case full of sieves, kneading chests, baker's peels and those carved Sardinian spoons that sit on the border between utensil and sculpture. Then the vine and the olive, with presses, jars, funnels, measures. And finally hemp and flax, with the hemp brakes, the carding combs, the scutching tools. Hemp processing in northern Italy was for centuries a widespread industry that nobody remembers today: those wooden machines are what remains of an entire economy.

A blunt opinion, because I owe it: this is the section that visitors cross fastest and it is the one where you learn the most. Whoever skips the plows to run to the nativity scenes behaves like someone who walks into the Uffizi and goes straight to the Venus, skipping the primitives. Legitimate, but shortsighted.

Pastoral work and transhumance

The pastoral section is one of the richest and concerns a world that in Italy ended recently, much more recently than people think. There are branding irons for marking animals, collars with bells of different sizes and different sound timbres, shearing scissors, ointments, salt horns. There is the part dedicated to milk: churns for butter, rush baskets for ricotta, butter molds carved with rosettes and stars, copper cauldrons. And there is transhumance, documented by the pack saddles for mules and donkeys, by the equipment of the sheepfolds, by the objects of the alpine pasture.

Abruzzo transhumance, the one that took flocks from the Gran Sasso to the Tavoliere along the drove roads, has been recognized as intangible cultural heritage of humanity, and seeing here the objects that made it possible helps to understand what it really was: not a pastoral stroll but an economic system regulated by laws, customs, tolls, an organization that the Kingdom of Naples administered with a dedicated office. The objects in the display case are the equipment of an enterprise, not the folklore of a postcard.

Hunting practices and seafaring work

Hunting takes up a smaller but dense space: flintlock guns, powder flasks in engraved horn, Calabrian and Sicilian knives with decorated handles, nets, snares, bird traps, decoys and terracotta whistles. These are objects that tell of subsistence hunting, not sport hunting, and that explain why in so many areas of Italy the minor wildlife was wiped out well before industrial agriculture.

Seafaring work is the section that surprises whoever arrives thinking of a museum of peasants. There are models of boats from the collection put together by Loria: river rafts, Adriatic bragozzi, lancette, paranze, coastal fishing boats. The sails are documented, the lateen sail and the lug sail, with their different geometries. There are fish traps, nets, fish spears, hooks, cork floats. And then there is the gondola.

The gondola kept at the museum was built in Venice at the end of the 19th century on the occasion of a visit to the city by Queen Margherita, and was restored at the Tramontin squero, one of the few Venetian boatyards that still built gondolas with traditional methods. Next to it is displayed a model of a squero, which shows the yard with its processes and its trades. Seeing a gondola inside a museum, out of the water, under artificial light, produces a strange effect: you notice the asymmetries of the hull, which in the lagoon nobody looks at because the boat is seen only floating and in motion. The gondola is asymmetrical by construction, because it has to compensate for the thrust of a single oar on one side only. On dry land, this calculated crookedness becomes evident and almost comic.

Craft work: wood, fibers, terracotta, metals, stone

The crafts section is ordered by raw material, and this choice allows a direct comparison of technical solutions from very distant regions. Wood, with handles, vessels hollowed from solid blocks, objects decorated with carving and pyrography. Plant fibers, with baskets, gerle, hampers and the large woven Sardinian vessels, which in their spiral geometry are objects of rare elegance. Terracotta, with kitchen and pantry pottery from the production centers of Liguria, Veneto and the Marche. Metals, wrought iron, copper, bronze, from specialized centers such as Valcamonica for iron and Agnone for bell bronze. Stone, with millstones, mortars and the alabaster objects of Volterra. And then the materials that escape any classification: the dried and incised gourds of Sardinia, used as containers and as musical instruments, horn, cork.

Spinning and weaving: the work of women

Reels, spinning wheels, distaffs, spindles, hand looms, shuttles, combs: the textile section gathers objects mostly datable between the 19th and the early 20th century and documents an activity that in the traditional division of labor was almost entirely female. Spinning was the gesture that filled the dead hours: people spun while walking, spun while watching the flock, spun in the evening. The distaffs and spindles kept here often carry incised decorations, initials, dates: they were engagement gifts, and their care was not ornament but declaration. A shepherd who spent months carving a distaff to give to a girl was writing a love letter in a language he could not write. The fibers worked are hemp, flax, wool and cotton, and their geographic distribution exactly follows the agricultural geography of the country.

Workshops and trade signs at the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions

This is the display case that amuses most, and it is also a small history of visual communication in a country of illiterates. Shop signs had to speak to those who could not read, so they showed the thing. A goldsmith's sign is a moon or a heart embossed in sheet metal. That of an 18th-century Venetian pharmacy carries the serpent, the ancient symbol of the medical art. That of a Piedmontese tobacconist displays the leaf. There is a pewter barber's basin from the Verona area, with the semicircular hollow for the customer's neck, an object that in Flemish painting is an iconographic attribute and here is simply a tool. There are the painted signs of the Florentine watermelon sellers, with slices of watermelon in a red that has not lost a gram of intensity. And there is the stand of a Palermo water seller, the portable kiosk of the man who sold water and salt in summer, a trade that survived in Sicily until a few decades ago and that today seems to come from another planet.

Living and dwelling: the Italian house before Italy

The second area of the route leaves work and enters domestic space. It opens with the models of housing types, which are the quickest way to understand how little sense it makes to speak of the Italian house in the singular.

Housing types at the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions: the Trentino house, the farmhouse, the trulli

The model of the Trentino house shows what scholars call the polymorphism of Alpine dwellings: a construction that mixes the Latin tradition of masonry and the Germanic tradition of wood, with the ground floor mostly in stone, the upper floors in boards, the roofing originally of straw and later of shingles, the balconies and galleries on the outer sides, and at the center of everything the stube, the large masonry stove that heated the main room and around which winter life was organized. The farmhouse of central Italy is the exact opposite: a single two-story masonry block, a gabled roof with a low pitch covered in clay tiles, with the dwelling and the farm quarters that may be side by side or stacked, with the stable on the ground floor warming the rooms from below. There are also the models of other housing forms, among them the Apulian trulli with their false-dome roofing in dry stone.

The interesting point is not the colorful variety. It is that each of these solutions solves a precise climatic, economic and legal problem: the stable under the bedroom because animal heat is free. The shingle roof because wood is there and lime is not. Dry stone because the tax on buildings hit constructions with mortar. Vernacular architecture is not naive, it is optimized. Whoever looks at it as colorful loses everything.

Furnishings, ceramics and daily gestures

The following display cases gather the equipment of the home: kneading chests, chests, rush-seated chairs, oil lamps, bed warmers, coal irons, ladles, cutting boards, cheese molds, grain measures. There is a notable collection of folk ceramics for the table and the pantry: the production of Caltagirone, with its greens and its yellows, that of Grottaglie, that of Lazio and Umbria. They are objects of use, often chipped, and the fact that they are chipped is part of their documentation: an intact plate in an ethnographic museum is almost always a plate that was never used.

The category of daily gestures, which the museum treats explicitly, is the conceptually most modern part of the installation. What counts is not only the object, it is the movement of the body that went with it: how dough was kneaded, how water was carried, how people slept in a one-room house where six slept. The objects alone don't say it. The photographs from the museum's archive, when they are displayed, do.

The life cycle: being born, marrying, dying

The life cycle section gathers cradles, baby walkers, swaddling bands, little clothes and toys for childhood. Then the trousseau, the regional wedding dresses, the bridal chests, the jewelry. Then the objects of mourning, the black costumes, the censers, the signs of domestic death. It is a sequence that in a few display cases covers the entire existence of a person, and it is perhaps the point where the museum hits hardest without meaning to.

The swaddling bands for newborns deserve a stop. Wrapping the baby tightly for months was a widespread practice throughout Italy, motivated by the belief that limbs grew crooked if left free. Pediatricians fought it for decades. Seeing the real bands, with their width and their length, explains in 10 seconds what an essay on the history of childhood explains in 50 pages. The cradle amulets also belong to this zone: corals, coral hands against the evil eye, little medals, animal teeth mounted in silver. The magical protection of childhood was a coherent system, not an episodic superstition.

Amulets, talismans and protection from evil

The museum holds a collection of amulets and talismans of notable breadth: silver pendants, horns, fig-sign hands, little bells, bags of herbs against fear, protections for horses and for boats. The structure is always the same: something pointed or noisy or fragrant placed between the body and the danger. Whoever expects to find a Southern color here has the wrong geography: the amulets come from the whole peninsula, including the Alpine valleys. Magical protection was not a specialty of the South, it was the preventive medicine of a country without medicine.

Rites, festivals and ceremonies: the spectacular part of the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions

The third area is the one the public remembers, and rightly so, because it contains objects that no other Italian museum displays together. Here material culture becomes stage design.

The nativity scenes of the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions: more than 1,000 figures, and the main reason to go up to EUR

The museum holds more than 1,000 nativity figures from different Italian regions. The most precious core is the Neapolitan one, with shepherds datable between the 17th and the 19th century and an extraordinary concentration in the 18th, which is the golden century of the Neapolitan nativity scene. Two large nativity scenes with Neapolitan shepherds and a Marche nativity scene of the 18th century are displayed, along with materials from other schools.

The 18th-century Neapolitan nativity scene is not a simple devotional object, and this is where a little context is needed. The figures have a body built on a core of iron wire and tow, which allows the pose to be articulated, and head, hands and feet in painted terracotta. The eyes are often glass. The clothes are in real fabric, sewn to scale, and the miniature accessories, from fruit baskets to animal harnesses, came out of the same artisan workshops that supplied the city. Those who modeled them were not anonymous devotees: they were professional sculptors, and some names are documented in the specialist Neapolitan literature.

The museum defines the nativity scene as a paradise of contrasts, and the formula is exact. Within the same scene live side by side the Nativity and the tavern, angels and fish sellers, the sacred and the market, pilgrims and dwarfs, cripples and musicians. The Neapolitan nativity scene is the representation of an entire city putting itself on stage while it watches a miracle, and it is probably the greatest visual document we have on the daily life of Naples in the century of the Bourbons. Whoever wants to see other Roman nativity collections will find the page of the International Nativity Scene Museum, which works on a different and more international scale.

A not very tender judgment: the nativity section of this museum is worth the trip by itself and for most of the year is visited by four people, tops, while in December half of Rome lines up to see nativity scenes that are a tenth of this. Go in May. The figures are the same and there is nobody.

The processional machines of the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions: Gubbio, Viterbo, Nola, Palmi, Palermo

The museum owns and displays models of the most important Italian processional machines, and this is a point where one has to be precise so as not to deceive anyone: these are scale models and parts, not the original objects that parade in the cities. The originals are and remain in their cities, and most of them are seen one night a year.

There are the Ceri of Gubbio, the three enormous wooden prisms that on May 15 of every year are carried at a run up Monte Ingino by hundreds of men, with Saint Ubaldo, Saint George and Saint Anthony on top. There is a part of the Macchina di Santa Rosa of Viterbo, the luminous tower 30 meters high that on September 3 about 100 porters carry on their shoulders through the streets of the city, an undertaking that has killed more than one man over the centuries. There are the Gigli of Nola, the wooden and papier-mache obelisks that parade in June with the little orchestras hoisted onto the base. There is the Varia of Palmi, in Calabria. There is the model of the Carro of Santa Rosalia of Palermo, the gigantic triumphal cart of the July Festino, and the Cereo of Catania. The museum also holds the grain machine of Foglianise, in the Benevento area, built with braided ears of wheat.

In 2013 the network of the great Italian shoulder-borne machines, which includes Gubbio, Viterbo, Nola and Palmi, was inscribed on the UNESCO representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. This room is therefore the only place in the world where you can observe together, in one afternoon, four traditions that in reality take place a thousand kilometers apart and in different months. It is a concentration that no trip could reproduce.

The time of the festival: masks, carnivals, Commedia dell'Arte

Next to the machines, the section dedicated to the festive calendar. The most singular piece is the 12 masks of the Procession of the Months of San Sosti, in the province of Cosenza: 12 figures personifying the months of the year that paraded carrying the attributes of seasonal activities. A calendar procession of this kind has roots that scholars trace in the medieval representations of the months, those sculpted on the portals of Romanesque cathedrals, and seeing them here in the form of Calabrian folk masks creates a historical short circuit that is worth the room by itself.

Then there are the masks of the Commedia dell'Arte, Arlecchino, Pulcinella, Pantalone, the Capitano, and the materials of regional carnivals. The Commedia dell'Arte in an ethnographic museum has its reason: those masks were born in the professional theater of the 16th century but quickly moved down into popular culture and stayed there, turning into figures of village carnival. The path between high and low, in Italy, almost always runs both ways.

The sound of tradition: folk musical instruments

The collection of folk musical instruments covers mainly the period between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, with a prevalence of southern and island provenances, and is ordered according to the canonical organological classification, the one that divides instruments into four families according to what produces the sound.

Idiophones are those in which the body of the instrument itself vibrates: triccheballacche, ratchets, jaw harps, cowbells, castanets. Membranophones are those with a stretched skin: tambourines of every size, friction drums like the putipù. Aerophones are those in which air vibrates: reed flutes, terracotta ocarinas, shawms, bagpipes, accordions. Chordophones are those with strings: chitarra battente, mandolins, mandolas, psalteries, colascioni. The Salento tambourine displayed in this case is not a souvenir: it is the instrument of the choreutic-musical therapy of tarantism, and the museum holds the sound archives that document those sessions.

Games and street shows: hand puppets, marionettes, pupi

The puppet theater section gathers hand puppets, marionettes and Sicilian pupi, with their collapsible traveling theaters, the painted backdrops, the brass armor of the paladins. The Sicilian pupi are the theatrical version of the same stories painted on the carts: the Chanson de Roland that reached Sicily through the Normans and the Angevins, stayed alive for eight centuries as a popular repertoire, performed evening after evening in cycles that could last an entire year. The Opera dei Pupi is also on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage, inscribed in 2008 after the proclamation of 2001.

Also displayed are hand puppets of Roman tradition and booth theaters. The hand puppet, moved by the hand inside the body, and the marionette, moved from above with strings, belong to two different trades and to two different social circuits: the puppeteer worked in squares and at fairs, the marionette player in indoor, paying halls. If you bring children, know that this is the room where they stay the longest and where they ask the best questions.

The rooms that change at the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions: Sala Lamberto Loria, Sala dossier, Sala delle colonne

Three spaces of the museum have a variable function and are not always accessible with the same contents. The Sala Lamberto Loria hosts temporary exhibitions. The Sala dossier hosts short-term thematic displays built with materials coming out of storage, and it is the space where the museum shows what is normally not seen: it is the room I advise checking first, because it is the one that changes. The Sala delle colonne holds ceramics, mostly from Grottaglie, among them the famous decorative finials that in Puglia were placed on the little pillars of balconies and terraces, objects halfway between sculpture and symbolic lightning rod.

The building: the Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari

The building that houses the museum was designed in 1938 by the architects Massimo Castellazzi, Pietro Morresi and Annibale Vitellozzi, as part of the plan for the Universal Exposition of Rome of 1942, the event that gave the neighborhood its name and that was never held because of the war. The square was then called Piazza Imperiale. The present name, dedicated to Guglielmo Marconi, came later, together with the marble obelisk that occupies its center. The overall urban layout was directed by Marcello Piacentini. The building across the way, the Palazzo delle Scienze, was built between 1938 and 1943 on a design by Luigi Brusa, Gino Cancellotti, Eugenio Montuori and Alfredo Scalpelli.

It is worth looking at the building from the outside before going in, and without hurry. The facade is marked by a giant order of travertine pilasters, the mass is compact, the symmetry absolute. It is regime architecture, and there is no point beating around the bush: these buildings were built to represent an idea of power. That said, the construction quality is high and the relationship with urban space still works, which explains why EUR has become for filmmakers the natural set of any film that wants to tell of modern alienation. Whoever wants to go deeper into the urban planning of the neighborhood will find material on the pages of the Square Colosseum and of the Palazzo dei Congressi.

The two mosaics of the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions: Prampolini and Depero, one facing the other

This is the most notable piece of public art on the square and can be seen for free, without a ticket, simply by crossing the colonnaded propylaeum that connects the two buildings.

On the Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari is the mosaic The Corporations by Enrico Prampolini, made in 1942. Prampolini, born in Modena in 1894 and died in Rome in 1956, was one of the protagonists of the second Futurism, a theorist of aeropainting and a set designer of international standing, with a career that had touched Paris and the European avant-gardes. The mosaic presents four anthropomorphic figures symbolizing Credit, Commerce, Industry and Agriculture, resolved with an essential geometry and a controlled chromatism that betrays the author's abstract experience.

Across the way, on the Palazzo delle Scienze, is the mosaic The Professions and the Arts by Fortunato Depero, also from 1942. Depero, born in Fondo in Trentino in 1892 and died in Rovereto in 1960, is the Futurist who more than any other has marked the Italian graphic imagination, the man of the Bitter Campari and of advertising as total art. His mosaic has a mechanical vitality, squared figures and bright colors, and the direct comparison between the two mosaics, a few dozen meters from each other, is the cheapest art history lesson in Rome.

The practical advice: look at them with the sun high, between 11:00 and 15:00, because the mosaic needs direct light to give back the vibration of the tesserae. On a gray day you see half. And look at them from a distance before up close, because both are composed to be read from 20 meters.

The bas-relief by Amerigo Tot and the floor never executed

Inside, the entrance portal to the Hall of Honor is decorated by the marble bas-relief Characteristic Elements of Folklore by Amerigo Tot, a Hungarian sculptor naturalized Italian, born in Fehérvárcsurgó in 1909 and died in Rome in 1984. Tot is a figure who deserves two words: trained at the Bauhaus and then moved to Italy, he signed the great frieze on the facade of Termini station toward Via Giolitti and, with a change of register that is almost novelistic, played the part of Michael Corleone senior in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II. His work here is measured, almost graphic, and goes unnoticed by most of the visitors who walk beneath it.

The atrium was also supposed to have a floor of inlaid marbles depicting costumes, masks and other decorative elements, commissioned from the painter Ferruccio Scattola, a Venetian, who lived between 1873 and 1950. That floor was never executed. It is one of the many unfinished things this building carries, and knowing them makes the visit smarter: you walk inside a building that is at once an interrupted project and a reused container.

The frescoes of the Hall of Honor

The fresco cycle of the Hall of Honor was conceived under the artistic direction of Cipriano Efisio Oppo, a painter and cultural organizer who was the director of the figurative arts at the 1942 Exposition, and carried out between 1940 and 1942 by a group of painters called to depict scenes of traditional Italian life. Many panels were left unfinished because of the war, and this incompleteness is today part of the document.

On the entrance wall are The Threshing of the Grain by Domenico Colao, The Sagra degli Osei in Friuli at Sacile by Mario Varagnolo, the Wedding Ceremony in Sardinia by Nino Bertoletti, left unfinished, the Funeral in Puglia at Lucera by Emanuele Cavalli and The Ox of Saint Zopito in Abruzzo at Loreto Aprutino by Tommaso Cascella. On the back wall are The Blessing of the Boat by Antonio Barrera, The Transport of the Must in Romagna by Garibaldo Guberti, the Procession in Lazio at Anticoli Corrado by Orazio Amato, also unfinished, and The Tuna Mattanza by Pietro Barillà. The fresco dedicated to the procession for Saint Efisio in Sardinia, which had been assigned to Mario Gambetta, was never made: in its place a cartoon attributed to Filippo Figari has been put.

Looking at this cycle today is an exercise I recommend to those with a taste for cultural history. They are images of festivals, funerals, works and processions painted in the middle of the regime by artists who belonged to very different milieus, some close to the Roman School, others not. The commission wanted a rural, united Italy without conflicts. The painters, more or less, painted what they knew how to paint. The result is ambiguous and for that reason interesting. The Hall of Honor is however also the museum's temporary exhibition space, and it happens that the installations partly cover the reading of the walls.

The history of the Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions, in order

The story of this museum is more than a century long and runs through all the phases of contemporary Italian history, from the positivism of the late 19th century to the critical museography of today. Knowing it changes the way you look at the display cases.

1881: Pigorini asks for an Italian section, the ministry says no

In 1881 Luigi Pigorini, director of the Royal Prehistoric Ethnographic Museum, asked the ministry for permission to open a section dedicated to documenting what the Italian peasant populations still had of their own. The request was rejected. It is worth pausing a moment on this date. In an Italy united for 20 years, ethnography was considered a discipline to be applied to the colonies and distant peoples, not to one's own fellow citizens: looking at Italian peasants with the tools of anthropology seemed, in the eyes of many, a diminution of national dignity. It would take a quarter of a century for that idea to change.

1905-1906: Lamberto Loria realizes the field of research is in Italy

Lamberto Loria was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on February 12, 1855, into a Jewish family from Livorno. He graduated in mathematics at Pisa in 1881 and spent 20 years traveling. In 1883 he had crossed Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia and Turkestan, collecting objects. Between 1888 and 1890 he had made his first expedition to New Guinea, exploring the southeastern coast, the D'Entrecasteaux archipelago and the Trobriand Islands. Between 1891 and 1897 he had gone back for a very long stay. In 1905 and 1906 he was in Eritrea, from where he brought back about 1,300 ethnographic objects meant for the anthropology museum of Florence.

It was on his return from that mission that his decisive idea took shape: the material worth saving was not in New Guinea but in Italy, and Italian peasant culture was disappearing under the blows of industrialization with no one documenting it. In September 1906 he opened the first Museo di Etnografia Italiana in Florence, with the collaboration of Aldobrandino Mochi, Alessandro D'Ancona, Francesco Baldasseroni, Giuseppe Pitrè and Raffaele Corso. The collection started with about 2,000 objects and within two years it counted 5,000.

A personal opinion on Loria: he was a man of formidable organizational talent and questionable ideology, like almost all the founders of ethnographic museums of his generation. He believed that the study of folklore had great civic value and served to strengthen national identity. That program doesn't hold up today, but without that program nobody would have collected what we see. The history of museums is full of these contradictions, and it's worth facing them instead of cleaning them up.

1911: the International Exposition and the 14 regional pavilions

In 1911, for the 50th anniversary of Italian Unification, the International Exposition was held, spread across Rome, Turin and Florence. In Rome, on the site of Piazza d'Armi, the Exhibition of Italian Ethnography was set up, with 14 regional pavilions built to reproduce popular architectural types and about 40 ethnographic groups, that is, scenes inhabited by real people in costume. The collection had grown to more than 30,000 objects. In October of that year the first Congress of Italian Ethnography met in Rome. Loria had founded the Società di Etnografia Italiana the year before and in 1912 he launched the journal Lares, which still exists and is the oldest Italian journal of demo-ethno-anthropological studies.

That exhibition was an enormous public success and a masterpiece of ambiguity. It staged an Italy of 20 souls that recognized itself as a single nation. It built regional diversity as a spectacle and at the same time filed it away as the past. The objects collected on that occasion are the heart of the collections you see today at number 8, and the arrangement by regions in the museum's first installation derived directly from there.

1913-1943: the decree, the crates, the bomb on Tivoli

Lamberto Loria died suddenly at his home in Rome in April 1913, at the age of 58, before seeing the museum he had planned come to life. The Great War stopped everything. The museum was formally established by the Royal Decree of September 10, 1923, no. 2111, as the Museo di Etnografia Italiana, but without an exhibition site. For decades the collections stayed packed in crates, moved from one warehouse to another.

In 1936, with the planning of the 1942 Universal Exposition, the permanent site was identified at EUR, and in 1939 the Exhibition of Popular Arts and Traditions was held. Then the war. The crates with the collections were moved to Villa d'Este in Tivoli for safety, and they were damaged in the bombing of 1943. How much was lost on that occasion is a matter of study. The fact that a substantial part was saved comes down to the packing and to luck. Anyone walking among the display cases would do well to keep this in mind: many of these objects went through two wars inside a crate.

1954, 1956, 2016: the three dates that matter

In 1954 the State obtained the EUR building on concession. The Museo nazionale delle arti e tradizioni popolari was inaugurated on April 20, 1956 and opened regularly to the public the following year, with an arrangement by regions curated by the folklorist Paolo Toschi. Since the end of the 1990s the new thematic itinerary you see today has been gradually introduced. In September 2016, with the reform of the state museums, the institute lost its autonomy and merged into the Museo delle Civiltà together with the prehistoric and ethnographic collections of the Pigorini, those of the Museo nazionale d'Arte Orientale Giuseppe Tucci and the Museo dell'Alto Medioevo, to which were added the collections of the former Colonial Museum and those of paleontology and litho-mineralogy from ISPRA.

A curiosity about the name that almost nobody knows: the dedication to Lamberto Loria, by which the museum is universally known, was never formalized by a decree. It's an established name in use, adopted by the institution and the literature, but without a founding act. The museum is called what everyone calls it, which in a museum of folk traditions has a perfect irony of its own.

The three figures who accompany the itinerary of the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari

The current installation is built around three characters, presented to the visitor as implicit guides: the founder, the anthropologist who renewed its method, and the collector who fed its collections. It's an effective narrative choice and also an honest one, because it shows that a museum is not a neutral storehouse but the result of choices made by people with a first and last name.

Lamberto Loria, the traveler who came home

We have already talked about Loria: a mathematician by training, an explorer by vocation, an ethnographer by late conversion. His legacy here is not only material but methodological: systematic collecting, cataloguing, attention to the context of use instead of the single beautiful piece. In his collections a spoon is worth a jewel if it documents a gesture. The photographs and travel diaries he left are in large part still unpublished, and this is one of the most interesting research reserves among those kept in the museum.

Annabella Rossi, the anthropologist of the South

Annabella Rossi, born in Rome on September 14, 1933 and died in the same city on March 4, 1984, joined the museum in 1960 and worked there until her illness. Even earlier, very young, she had put collections in order at the Pigorini and taken part in research in central and southern Italy. In 1959 she met Ernesto de Martino and took part in two decisive campaigns: the one in Puglia on tarantism and the one in Basilicata on the sense of sin in a southern community.

Her books are still texts that people read today: Le feste dei poveri in 1969, Lettere da una tarantata in 1970, which collects the correspondence received from a woman of Salento and remains one of the most striking documents of Italian ethnography, Carnevale si chiamava Vincenzo written in 1977 with Roberto De Simone, and the posthumous E il mondo si fece giallo, on tarantism in Campania, published in 1991. She was among the first in Italy to use photography and film footage systematically as research tools, and she left the museum a vast photographic, sound and film documentation, which is one of the reasons why the 500,000 negatives mentioned in the figures are not a decorative number.

Evan Gorga, the tenor who bought everything

Gennaro Evangelista Gorga, known as Evan Gorga, was born in Broccostella in Ciociaria on February 6, 1865 and died in Rome on December 5, 1957. He was the first Rodolfo in history: he sang in the world premiere of Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème at the Teatro Regio in Turin on February 1, 1896, under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. His career broke off abruptly in January 1899, for reasons never entirely clarified, and from that moment Gorga devoted himself to a passion that became an obsession: buying.

He bought musical instruments, ceramics, glass, weapons, archaeological objects, scientific material, furniture, relics of every kind, until he occupied 10 connecting apartments on Via Cola di Rienzo, turned into an unmanageable private museum. He ruined himself. In 1929 the collections were placed under administrative seizure to prevent their dispersal. With an agreement approved in 1949 and made enforceable by a law of June 30, 1950, the State acquired ownership, taking on the collector's debts and setting up scholarships for young singers. Those collections are now distributed among many Italian museums, and a part also ended up here.

Gorga's story should be told to anyone who thinks collecting is an elegant hobby. He was a man who destroyed himself financially to accumulate objects that nobody wanted, and thanks to that ruin he handed over to the Italian State tens of thousands of pieces that would otherwise have been lost. Italy's public heritage is made up of these crooked biographies too.

Gianfranco Baruchello and contemporary art at the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari

The museum has introduced elements of contemporary art into the itinerary, and in particular materials linked to the Psicoenciclopedia possibile by Gianfranco Baruchello, an artist born in Livorno in 1924 and died in Rome in 2023, an anomalous and central figure of Italian art in the second half of the 20th century, close to Marcel Duchamp and the author of a body of work that has always dealt with systems of classification and their failure. Putting an impossible encyclopedia at the entrance of a museum that obsessively classifies popular objects is an intelligent critical gesture. It tells the visitor that every ordering is provisional and that the way we have divided the world into boxes says more about us than about the world. The Museo delle Civiltà has been working in this direction for years, with commissions to contemporary artists permanently installed in its venues.

Temporary exhibitions and works in progress: what you see today at the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari

The Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari is not only home to the permanent collection. It's also the main venue for the temporary exhibitions of the Museo delle Civiltà, and the program is livelier than the apparent drowsiness of the neighborhood would suggest. During 2026 the building hosted the major exhibition on the 150 years of the institution, titled ORIGINE e PROSPETTIVE, dedicated to the path that leads from the Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum founded by Luigi Pigorini in 1876 to the Museo delle Civiltà of today, curated by Paolo Boccuccia, Camilla Fratini and Myriam Pierri under the general direction of Andrea Viliani. Also in this building were a show on the restoration projects funded through the Art Bonus and an exhibition devoted to the representation of identity in popular costume in Romanian art.

The program changes, so there is only one practical rule: check the calendar on the museum's official website before leaving, especially if you want to see the Salone d'Onore free of charge. The temporary exhibitions here are not a side dish. They occupy central spaces and often speak directly to the permanent collections, which is the reason why it's worth coming back more than once in the same year.

The rearrangement under way at the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari and how to approach it

Part of the rooms is affected by rearrangement work, and the museum says so openly. It means that the room-by-room lists that have been circulating online for 15 years guarantee nothing, and that the sequence of the rooms may turn out different from the one described in any guidebook. The right way to take it is this: call the switchboard the day before if you are coming from outside Rome for a specific section, and otherwise go in without rigid expectations, because what is open is more than enough for three full hours. Material culture is not visited with a shopping list.

How to really visit the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari

The honest length of the visit is an hour and a half for someone who looks carefully at the main sections, two and a half hours for someone who reads the panels, and a good three hours for someone who also wants the building, the outdoor mosaics and a temporary exhibition. If you decide to do number 14 as well on the same day, count on a whole half day and a real break between the two.

The order of visit I recommend

Go in at 8:00, or 8:30 at the latest. Do the ground floor first, with transport and trades, which is the densest part and requires a clear head. Then go up to the first floor for the cycle of life, festivals, processional machines, nativity scenes and music, which are more immediate sections and stand up better to tiredness. Go out and cross the square under the colonnade for the two mosaics, with the sun high. Whoever still has energy goes into number 14 with the same ticket. Whoever doesn't sits down in a bar on Viale Europa, and does well.

What to bring, and what to leave at home

The cloakroom with storage is available at the entrance, as in all state museums, and large backpacks are not taken into the rooms. Comfortable shoes, because the floors are hard and the distances between the two wings of the building are not negligible. A bottle of water in summer, because the neighborhood is wide and outdoors there is no shade. And a recommendation that sounds pedantic: bring your reading glasses, if you need them. The captions in an ethnographic museum are long out of necessity, and without them half the objects remain incomprehensible.

The Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari with kids

It works, and it works better than parents expect, but with an age limit. Under 6, the farm tools say nothing. Between 6 and 12 this museum is a mine: the painted Sicilian carts, the puppets, the pupi in armor, the processional machines, the nativity scenes, the musical instruments. The key is to start from the top, that is, from the spectacular part, and leave the plows for the end or skip them altogether. An hour and a quarter, no more.

Afterward, kids need to run, and the neighborhood allows it like few others in Rome: the laghetto dell'EUR is a 10-minute walk away and has lawns, ducks, Japanese cherry trees in spring and paddle boat rental. The EUR Social Park has games and equipped areas. If instead you are looking for a museum built specifically for children, you have to allow for a trip toward Flaminio, where you find Explora, or toward Villa Borghese for the Museo Civico di Zoologia. They are on the other side of the city, and it's best to know that before promising anything.

When to go and when to avoid

The best time is early morning on a weekday, especially Tuesday and Wednesday. The worst time is the afternoon of the first Sunday of December, when free admission and the nativity-scene season add up and the crowd doubles, which here still means a modest crowd compared with the center. In summer the building is cool and the neighborhood is deserted. August at EUR is one of the best ideas in Rome, because while the center is impossible here you walk in an almost unreal silence. In autumn and spring the light on the square is the best for photographs of the architecture.

What is around the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari within a 10-minute walk

The square of the obelisk at Marconi is the geometric center of EUR, and from there you can reach on foot almost everything the neighborhood has to show. The Colosseo Quadrato, that is, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, is eight minutes away. The Palazzo dei Congressi by Adalberto Libera is on the same axis. The Fuksas Cloud rises right opposite, and the comparison between the two buildings, 70 years apart, is a free architecture lesson, taken standing in the middle of the street. The Palazzo dello Sport by Nervi and Piacentini, built for the 1960 Olympics, is beyond the little lake. If you have a long day, you can go down as far as the Abbazia delle Tre Fontane, which is a couple of kilometers away and belongs to another world.

Three museums to understand Italian popular culture

Anyone who gets passionate about this subject has in Rome an itinerary worth building. This museum for the material culture of peasants and artisans. The Museo di Roma in Trastevere for urban popular Rome, with the photographs, the watercolors of Ettore Roesler Franz and the scenes of Roman life. The Museo Etrusco di Villa Giulia to understand that many gestures of Italian material culture have a chronological depth that goes well beyond the Middle Ages. Three museums, three time scales, the same question.

A curiosity about the Museo delle arti e tradizioni popolari "Lamberto Loria" - Museo delle Civiltà

The curiosity concerns the name, and it's one of those things you only discover by reading the specialist literature. The museum is known all over the world as the Museo delle arti e tradizioni popolari Lamberto Loria. The name appears in scientific publications, on signs, in catalogs, in conference proceedings. Yet that dedication does not appear to have ever been regularized by a decree. That is, there is no administrative act that formally names the institute after its founder. The museum bears Loria's name by custom, not by law.

Stop for a moment and consider how perfect all this is. A museum born to document practices handed down by use and not by written code, the festivals nobody ever decreed, the trades learned by watching, the songs that have no author, bears a name that in turn was handed down by use and not by formal act. Custom did to the museum what the museum studies: it named it without writing it down anywhere.

There's more, and here the story becomes almost ironic. Loria never saw either this building or this collection in its present form. He died in 1913, 10 years before the founding decree of 1923, 23 years before the site at EUR was identified, 43 years before the 1956 inauguration. The man after whom the museum is named without a decree never set foot in the building that bears his name. He left a plan and a method, and the rest was done by others, often in disagreement among themselves about how to do it.

A second, minor curiosity: in the atrium of the building you walk on a floor that is not the one planned. The original design called for a marble inlay depicting costumes and masks, commissioned from Ferruccio Scattola. It was never carried out, and so under the visitors' feet there is a design void, an absence of 80 years that nobody has touched since. In a museum that also keeps broken objects because damage is a document, a floor that was never made is perhaps the most consistent piece of the building.

One thing nobody tells you about the Museo delle arti e tradizioni popolari "Lamberto Loria" - Museo delle Civiltà

The 10 euro ticket you pay at the ticket desk at number 8 is valid for all the venues of the Museo delle Civiltà, and it's valid for the whole day. Nobody explains it at the desk, nobody writes it on the wall in huge letters, and the consequence is that most visitors pay, go in, come out and go home having seen half of what they bought. The building opposite, at number 14, houses prehistory, the African, American, Asian and Oceanic collections, the early Middle Ages, the former Colonial Museum, paleontology. Whoever leaves the Loria at 11 in the morning and crosses the square uses the same entrance ticket. It's perhaps the best ratio between price and square meters of museum in Rome, and it remains a secret through pure collective inattention.

The second thing almost nobody says is that the two Futurist mosaics, which are works by two major names of 20th-century Italian art, can be seen without paying anything. The colonnaded propylaeum that connects the two buildings is open public space. You walk under it, raise your head, and look at Prampolini on one side and Depero on the other. No turnstile, no opening hours, no line. An informed tourist can do an hour of 20th-century art history at EUR at zero cost, and this in a city where to see a Caravaggio in a church you have to fight with a coin machine that devours one-euro coins.

The third concerns the hours and holds for people who work. Opening at 8:00 in the morning allows a visit before the office, and it's a possibility that very few museums in Rome offer. An hour between 8 and 9, in a museum where at 8 there are three people, is worth two hours of any afternoon. Whoever lives in the area and has bought the annual card for 22 euros can build a visiting habit in episodes: one morning transport, another the nativity scenes, yet another the popular music. It's the right way to consume a museum of this density, and nobody ever suggests it.

The last is the most practical: here there is almost never a line and there is no official online advance sale. Anyone who promises priority tickets for this address is selling a service that solves a problem that doesn't exist.

The advice I give you for visiting the Museo delle arti e tradizioni popolari "Lamberto Loria" - Museo delle Civiltà

The main advice is to reverse the mental order in which you go in. Almost everyone arrives thinking of the nativity scenes, which are the famous section, and puts them first. They spend 40 minutes in front of the Neapolitan shepherds, then run through the work rooms and leave with the idea that the rest was filler. Do the opposite. Begin with the carts and the tools, with a fresh head, and keep the nativity scenes for the end as a reward. The work rooms are difficult and require attention. If you tackle them tired you don't understand them, and then they really do become just lumber in a display case.

The second piece of advice concerns the method of reading. In a museum of material culture you don't look at the single piece, you look at the series. Take a display case of sickles and notice the differences in curvature, in handle length, in toothing. Every variation answers to a type of grain, to a slope of the ground, to an average height of the stalks. Do it with three display cases and you will have learned to read the whole museum. Do it with none and you will remain in front of a thousand indistinct objects. This is the museum where the difference between a bored visitor and an enthusiastic visitor depends almost entirely on the method of observation, not on the culture you start with.

The third piece of advice is to leave the building halfway through the visit. It sounds like a contradiction and it isn't. Go out, cross the propylaeum, look at the two mosaics, breathe the square, then go back in. The building and the collection are the same document, and seeing the Fascist mosaic of the corporations on the facade after looking inside at the plows of the peasants whom that regime celebrated in words helps to put the pieces together. An ethnographic museum built by a regime that needed a mythical people is a double historical object, and the doubleness can be read by walking.

Fourth and last piece of advice, the most practical: call ahead if you are coming from far away for a specific section, arrive at 8, put on comfortable shoes, and don't try to do both buildings in a single morning. Number 8 and number 14 together make about 50,000 square meters. Whoever tackles them back to back leaves at 2 in the afternoon with a head full of nothing. Better two days, or better still the annual card and five short visits.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

That this museum comes from the 1911 Exhibition of Italian Ethnography you read everywhere. What is almost never said is what that exhibition really was, and the consequences it had on the collections you walk through today.

In 1911 Italy celebrated 50 years of unity and set up an international exposition divided among three cities. In Rome, on the area of Piazza d'Armi, 14 regional pavilions were built that reproduced popular architectural types: houses, threshing floors, ovens, porticoes. Inside and around those pavilions about 40 ethnographic groups were set up. And here we have to stop, because an ethnographic group was not a mannequin. They were real people, brought from their respective regions, who wore traditional costumes and repeated gestures of work and festival in front of the paying public of the capital.

Peasants from Abruzzo, Sardinian shepherds, weavers, embroiderers, musicians were put on show for months as an attraction of a universal exposition, in the same year in which Italy landed in Libya. The logic of the display was that of the colonial villages which the great European expositions dedicated to overseas peoples, applied this time to their own fellow citizens. The implicit message was that those populations belonged to a past that the modern nation was leaving behind, and that you could look at them the way you look at an archaeological find.

The collections gathered on that occasion, more than 30,000 objects, form the historical core of what you see today at number 8. The contemporary museum knows this and for years has been working critically on this origin, exactly as it works on the colonial origin of other collections. But the visitor walking among the display cases rarely has this key, and without it half the right questions are missing. Every object in here has two stories: that of the use for which it was made and that of the collection that tore it away from that use. Looking only at the first is comfortable, and it reduces a museum of anthropology to a nostalgic flea market.

Our position: this awareness takes nothing away from the pleasure of the visit, it doubles it. A Sicilian cart remains beautiful even when you know why it ended up in a Roman display case. In fact, it becomes more so.

The right photo to take at the Museo delle arti e tradizioni popolari "Lamberto Loria" - Museo delle Civiltà

The best photograph is not inside, it's under the colonnade. Stand in the middle of the propylaeum that connects the two buildings, with Prampolini's mosaic on one side and Depero's on the other, and look for the framing in which the row of pillars frames one of the two mosaics at the end of the perspective. It's a photograph that conveys the urban planning idea of the neighborhood, the symmetry, the depth, and at the same time contains a work of mature Futurism. Best time: between 11:00 and 15:00, with the sun high, because the mosaic needs direct light to light up. Against the light everything is lost.

The second framing is the whole facade of the Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari seen from the Marconi obelisk, which lets you take in the entire front in a single shot. With a wide-angle lens the symmetry becomes almost abstract. In late afternoon, when the travertine takes on its warm color, the photograph works in black and white too, in fact especially in black and white, because Italian rationalist architecture was born thinking of the black-and-white photographs of the magazines of the time, and that's where it does its best.

Inside the museum, the photograph to take home is the one of the Sicilian carts. Don't shoot it head-on. Stand at a three-quarter angle, at the same height as the painted side boards, and try to capture the whole cart together with the detail of a chivalric scene. No flash, for obvious conservation reasons, and no tripod: in the rooms you aren't allowed to clutter the passages. The interior light is warm and uneven, so it's better to raise the sensitivity and accept a bit of noise rather than lose sharpness. Whoever has a recent smartphone gets surprising results by holding the lens 20 centimeters from the glass and resting a hand on the post to steady it.

The fourth photograph, the one nobody thinks of taking, is the detail of a display case of work tools shot from above: 100 similar blades, all different, lined up in a row. It becomes an abstract image, almost typographic, and it communicates the true nature of this museum, which is not a collection of masterpieces but the power of the series. If I had to choose a single image to describe the Loria to someone who has never been, I would choose that one.

One last recommendation on the rules: personal photography without flash is normally allowed in Italian state museums, but temporary exhibitions may have restrictions due to loans and rights on contemporary works. If you see a sign with a crossed-out camera, that counts for more than any custom.

Some important events that took place here in history

The first event this place holds is an absence: the 1942 Universal Exposition of Rome, for which the building was designed in 1938 and built, never took place. The war canceled it. The whole neighborhood is therefore the set of an event that did not happen, monumental buildings built for a crowd that never came. Walking here means crossing the scenery of a canceled show, and this is the key with which EUR has to be read.

The second event is the Exhibition of Popular Arts and Traditions inaugurated on June 10, 1939, in the preparatory phase of the Exposition. It was the moment when the collections, stalled and packed since the 1923 decree, became visible to the public again for the first time after decades in storage.

The third is dramatic. During the Second World War the crates containing the collections were moved for safety to Villa d'Este, in Tivoli, considered better protected than the capital. In 1943 the bombing of Tivoli hit the storage as well and the collections suffered damage. Villa d'Este itself was badly hit on that occasion. It's an episode almost nobody connects with this museum, and which instead explains why some series are missing pieces and why certain objects bear old and visible restorations.

The fourth event is the inauguration of April 20, 1956, with the arrangement by regions curated by the folklorist Paolo Toschi, and the regular opening to the public the following year. It was a significant cultural event in an Italy of the incipient boom: a museum devoted to the peasant world opened in exactly the years when that world was emptying out, with millions of people moving from the South toward the industrial triangle. The museum was born as an act of conservation while the object of the conservation was leaving the homes. Few museums have timing as cruel and as necessary.

The fifth event is less visible but decisive: between 1959 and the early 1960s, the entry into the museum of the field research methodologies linked to the school of Ernesto de Martino, with Annabella Rossi hired in 1960. From that moment the museum stops being just a storehouse of objects and becomes a center for the production of documents: photographs, sound recordings, films shot in the villages, in Puglia, in Basilicata, in Campania. The 500,000 negatives preserved today come in large part from that season.

The sixth event is the reform of 2016, which abolished the autonomy of the institute and merged it into the Museo delle Civiltà together with four other collections. In Italian administrative history it's one line. In the life of a museum it's an earthquake, because it changes scientific direction, budget, exhibition priorities and even the name that appears on the documents.

The seventh is recent and ongoing: the celebrations of the 150 years of the institution, counted from the founding of Pigorini's museum in 1876, with the exhibition ORIGINE e PROSPETTIVE hosted in this very building in 2026. A museum that displays its own history as an object of study is a museum that has stopped considering itself neutral, and this is perhaps the most significant event of all.

Who passed through the Museo delle arti e tradizioni popolari "Lamberto Loria" - Museo delle Civiltà

The people who have passed through this institution, and who determined its form, deserve to be called by name, because in an ethnographic museum the chain of hands that collected is part of the collection.

Luigi Pigorini, archaeologist and paleoethnologist, was the first to ask, in 1881, for a section devoted to Italy's peasant populations and to be refused. His rejected request is the missed birth certificate of this museum, and his name is now tied to the collections of the building opposite.

Lamberto Loria, born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1855, mathematician, traveler in Lapland, Russia, Turkestan, New Guinea and Eritrea, founded the first Museo di Etnografia Italiana in Florence in 1906, organized the Exhibition of 1911, founded the Società di Etnografia Italiana in 1910 and the journal Lares in 1912. He died in Rome in April 1913, without seeing any of what would happen afterward.

Giuseppe Pitrè, the Palermo physician who is the acknowledged father of Italian demology, author of the monumental Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari siciliane, collaborated in Loria's undertaking. With him were Aldobrandino Mochi, a Florentine anthropologist, Alessandro D'Ancona, a philologist and historian of literature, Francesco Baldasseroni and Raffaele Corso, who would become one of the central figures of 20th-century Italian demological studies.

Cipriano Efisio Oppo, painter and organizer, directed the art section of the 1942 Exposition and devised the program of frescoes for the Salone d'Onore. Working here under his direction were Domenico Colao, Mario Varagnolo, Nino Bertoletti, Emanuele Cavalli, Tommaso Cascella, Antonio Barrera, Garibaldo Guberti, Orazio Amato and Pietro Barillà. Mario Gambetta was assigned a panel that was never painted, and in its place there is a cartoon attributed to Filippo Figari.

Enrico Prampolini and Fortunato Depero, two of the major names of Italian Futurism, left the 1942 mosaics on the two facing buildings. Amerigo Tot, a Hungarian sculptor later naturalized Italian, author of the frieze at Termini station and an actor in The Godfather Part II, signed the bas-relief of the inner portal. Ferruccio Scattola received the commission for the atrium floor and did not complete it.

Paolo Toschi, folklorist and first organizer of the 1956 installation, gave the museum its first public form, the one by regions, which educated generations of Italian schoolchildren. Annabella Rossi, who joined in 1960, a student and collaborator of Ernesto de Martino, brought here the method of field research, photography and the tape recorder, and left the museum an extraordinary archive of documents. De Martino himself, the greatest Italian anthropologist of the 20th century, was not an official of this museum but his research in Puglia and Lucania directly fed these collections.

Evan Gorga, the tenor who sang the first Rodolfo of La Bohème at the Regio in Turin on February 1, 1896 with Toscanini on the podium, poured into the Italian state collections a mass of objects gathered over a lifetime of compulsive collecting, and part of that material is here.

Gianfranco Baruchello, one of the freest artists of the Italian second half of the 20th century, a friend and interlocutor of Marcel Duchamp, entered the exhibition itinerary with his Psicoenciclopedia possibile. Andrea Viliani now directs the Museo delle Civiltà, and the exhibition on the 150 years of the institution was curated by Paolo Boccuccia, Camilla Fratini and Myriam Pierri.

Finally the nameless, who are the majority: the cart driver who painted the paladins on the side boards, the woman who spun with that distaff, the shepherd who carved the collar, the squerarolo who built the gondola for the visit of Queen Margherita. We don't know their registry records, but we know their hands, because the hands left their mark on the handle. In a museum of popular arts and traditions these are the true famous figures, and anyone who writes the list of illustrious visitors here without mentioning them has understood little.

Quick questions about the Museo delle arti e tradizioni popolari "Lamberto Loria" - Museo delle Civiltà

Where exactly is the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari?

At Piazza Guglielmo Marconi 8, in the EUR neighborhood, in the Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari. Not at number 14, which is the building opposite and houses the other collections of the Museo delle Civiltà.

What are the opening hours?

Tuesday to Sunday, from 8:00 to 19:00, with last entry at 18:30. Closed on Monday.

How much does a ticket to the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari cost?

Full price €10.00, reduced €2.00 for citizens of the European Union between 18 and 25 years old. There is an annual card at €22.00 valid for all venues.

Is the ticket valid for the Pigorini too?

Yes. The entrance ticket is single for all the venues of the Museo delle Civiltà and lets you visit the building at number 14 as well on the same day.

Can you buy tickets for the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari online?

No, the museum has no online sales of its own. You buy at the ticket desk. No commercial platform offers official entrance tickets for this address.

Do I need to book the visit?

For individual visitors, no. Booking is mandatory only for groups and school classes.

How long does it take to visit the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari?

An hour and a half for a careful visit of the main sections, two and a half hours for a full visit with reading of the panels, three hours if you add the building and a temporary exhibition.

Is admission free on the first Sunday of the month?

Yes, admission is free for everyone on the first Sunday of every month and on April 25.

Is it the same museum as the Pigorini?

They are two different collections of the same institute. Since 2016 both have been part of the Museo delle Civiltà, but they are housed in two separate buildings on the same square.

Why is the museum called Lamberto Loria?

Because Loria, an ethnographer and traveler who lived between 1855 and 1913, gathered the original core of the collections and in 1906 founded in Florence the first Museo di Etnografia Italiana from which this museum descends.

Are the nativity scenes there all year at the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari?

The nativity-scene core is part of the permanent collection and is not a seasonal installation. Since part of the rooms is affected by works, it's best to check at the time of your visit.

Do you pay to see the Prampolini and Depero mosaics?

No. They are on the outer facades and can be seen free of charge from the colonnaded propylaeum that joins the two buildings.

Is the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari suitable for children?

Yes between six and 12 years old, thanks to the Sicilian carts, the puppets, the pupi, the processional machines and the nativity scenes. Under six, the section on work tools is hard to understand.

Is it wheelchair accessible?

Yes. There are elevators, equipped restrooms, wheelchairs available free of charge and reserved parking spaces in front of the entrance. Admission is free for people with disabilities and for the companion.

Can you take photographs at the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari?

Personal photography without flash is normally allowed. Temporary exhibitions may have limitations indicated in the room.

Is there a cloakroom?

Yes, at the entrance, and large backpacks must be left there before going up to the rooms.

Are there guided tours at the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari?

Yes, run by the AbIntra cooperative: €5.00 per person on weekends for individual visitors, €100.00 for a group of up to 20 people, €120.00 in English.

Can you get there by metro?

Yes, Metro B, EUR Fermi stop, a five-minute walk. Alternatively buses 30, 170, 671, 714 and 791.

Can you park?

In the streets around the square, street parking is mostly free, which is rare in Rome, and there are spaces reserved for people with disabilities in front of both entrances.

Can dogs go in?

The Museo delle Civiltà admits pets in the afternoon time slot with a reduced ticket. Guide dogs and service dogs always enter free of charge, as the law provides.

How long is the wait in line?

Under normal conditions none, or a few minutes. The only occasions with a small crowd are the first Sundays of the month and the opening days of exhibitions.

What is the difference between this museum and the Museo di Roma in Trastevere?

Here the story is the material culture of peasants, shepherds, artisans and sailors from all over Italy. The Museo di Roma in Trastevere tells the story of urban popular Roman life through photographs, watercolors and reconstructions.

Is it worth it if I have only a few days in Rome?

On a first trip, no. From the second on, and for anyone with an interest in anthropology, social history or 20th-century architecture, yes and without hesitation.

Is the Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari always open in full?

No. Part of the rooms is affected by rearrangement work and the itinerary may vary. For a specific section it's best to call the museum before leaving.

The Museo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari is the most overlooked museum in Rome and one of the three or four that I recommend most firmly to people coming back to the city for the second or third time. It has no masterpiece to put on the cover, no line, nothing that an algorithm can sell you. It has one thing only, and it's worth the trip: inside those display cases is the Italy that stopped existing between 1950 and 1970, collected piece by piece by people who understood before everyone else that it was about to vanish. Go on a Tuesday morning at 8, start with the carts, finish with the nativity scenes, and leave looking at the mosaics. 10 euros, half a day, and an understanding of the country you find yourself in that no tour of the historic center will ever give you.

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

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