The Oliverian Archaeological Museum will reopen in the fall with a new layout.

The Museo Archeologico Oliveriano, one of the oldest museums in the Marche region, will open this fall with a new layout.The museum was born out of the testamentary bequest of Annibale degli Abbati Oliveri (1708-1789), an eighteenth-century scholar who donated his considerable library and archaeological holdings to Pesaro and his fellow citizens. Olivieri’s bequest also included many artifacts donated to him a few years earlier by his friend Giovan Battista Passeri (1684-1780), an eclectic intellectual who marked Pesaro’s eighteenth century.

Located on the ground floor of Palazzo Almerici, a 17th-century aristocratic building in the heart of the historic center, and managed by the Fondazione Ente Olivieri, the museum documents 1,000 years of the area’s history. The rearrangement and reopening are thus an important milestone that gives Pesaro Italian Capital of Culture 2024 back one of its most significant cultural venues.

The new permanent arrangement of the museum gives shape to the scientific project proposed and elaborated by Chiara Delpino (archaeologist of the Ministry of Culture) and is curated and financed by the Municipality of Pesaro and the Ministry of Culture/Regional Secretariat of Marche. The museographic project is signed by STARTT (architecture and territorial transformations studio) founded by Simone Capra, Claudio Castaldo and Dario Scaravelli. The Culture Office of the Swiss Government supported the restoration project of the Novilara Necropolis grave goods, prepared by officials of the Soprintendenza delle Marche (Fabio Milazzo and Chiara Delpino). The restorations are by Mirco Zaccaria, Renaud Bernadette, Federica Russo, Giorgia Gili, Cristiana Giabbani, and Laura Petrucci. Special thanks to the contractors: Mancinelli Allestimenti/Pesaro for the staging, Dago/Pesaro and Fano for the installations, Montenovi/Roma for the handling of the works of art, and Gambini Restauri/Pesaro for the construction work. Graphics are by Giorgio Donini with Silvia Borghetto, Katia Fornaroli, Emanuele Mandolini, Michele Marchionni.

“There are so many people behind a long and always active work even in all these years since 2013,” said Daniele Vimini deputy mayor and alderman for Beauty of the City of Pesaro during the preview of the new permanent display. “The sense of today is, beyond a date that traces the first inauguration of the museum held on July 31, 1892, to show you the result of a journey that began in 2013. What’s more, it is a project that constituted a 1.2 million euro investment for the administration. For today, the exhibition part of the museum is finally ready, there is one part missing that will be completed in view of the inauguration in the fall: it is the services part (bookshop, bathrooms on the ground floor, ticket office, hall). The Oliverian theme has been carried forward year by year with funds earmarked for this precise purpose. Work has been done to have all the space needed for the museum. The museographic project also has a long history related to the 2016 Kounellis exhibition, an event that marked the city’s cultural offerings. There will be targeted guided tours with the school community, for residents and merchants in the area, and for categories related to this place of culture and this nerve center area. And then we look forward to next fall with the opening to the city and to all visitors from the rest of Italy.”

“From the very beginning when I accepted the presidency of Ente Olivieri I was impressed by the initial speech made by Mayor Ricci assuring us of all the support of the municipality for a revitalization and renovation of the venue and heritage, an important promise that has been kept,” added Fabrizio Battistelli President of Ente Olivieri. “The path we have taken allows us to arrive at the new museum layout with all the difficulties of the times but with a remarkable outcome: the layout is extremely brilliant in its technical solutions and in its rendering not only aesthetic but also very thorough and engaging on the anthropological level. On the one hand the Roman heritage, on the other the Picene civilization with all the weight also spiritual of the Necropolis: the result is a place of contemplation and reflection.” “Intervening in an existing museum is never easy,” he continues. “In the case of the Oliverian, the choice was made to work radically so that a rich and valuable heritage could be enjoyed by a universal audience. Not only that. To emotionally engage the visitor, the language of art was borrowed; in this sense, the layout is a tribute to Jannis Kounellis, a great master of Italian art, and his artistic use of the fragment. The new itinerary documents a thousand years of the territory’s history, from the Picenian period to the late imperial age, and is divided into four exhibition sections, keys to the narrative of the entire corpus of the collections: the Picenian necropolis of Novilara, the lucus pisaurensis (an important place of worship connected to the Romanization of the territory, discovered by Olivieri himself on the hill of Santa Veneranda), the town hall of Pisaurum and eighteenth-century collecting. Within these macro-areas the exhibition is organized in chronological order by individual topics.”

The four themes are introduced in the first room so that the visitor can follow a logical thread within the different rooms. On display here is the famous naval battle stele, found in 1866 under unknown circumstances on the hill of San Nicola in Valmanente, between Pesaro and Novilara.

The second room displays finds from Novilara, one of the most important Iron Age necropolises, first extensively investigated by archaeologist Edoardo Brizio in the years 1892-1893. These have recently been joined by materials from the excavations conducted in 2012-2013 by the Soprintendenza Archeologia delle Marche in a large sector of the same necropolis: these are some of the grave goods from the more than 450 male and female tombs from the 8th and 7th centuries BC. The focus is on the narrative of the society of the time, as far as it can be reconstructed through the symbology of funeral ritual. Five of the grave goods from the latest research have been restored thanks to the support of the Scavolini Foundation.

Continuing in chronological order, the display of the cippus from Lucus Pisaurensis introduces the third room, entirely dedicated to Pesaro in the Roman age. The oldest votive altars of the Lucus testify that already in the 3rd century B.C., thus before the founding of the colony of Pisaurum (184 B.C.), people from Latium had settled in the territory of Pesaro. Within a section devoted to the deities, the famous bilingual (Etruscan and Latin) epigraph of Lucius Cafatius a soothsayer who practiced the art of haruspices is displayed. This is followed by an account of the public buildings of imperial-era Pisaurum, handed down from epigraphic evidence. A voice is then given to the inhabitants of Pisaurum, through epigraphs that record the presence of priests and priestesses, masters, soldiers, blacksmiths, naval workers, and more. The section concludes with numerous funerary epigraphs.

Finally, the last two rooms of the third room house the eighteenth-century collecting of Passeri and Olivieri with an example of each type of the many categories of objects that made up the two collections (small bronzes of deities, oil lamps, painted vases, more). The ensemble of other artifacts, placed in the background behind these items, suggests the idea of a wunderkammer that is particularly evocative for the visitor thanks to a very strong sense of three-dimensionality.

Image: Marche Region

The Oliverian Archaeological Museum will reopen in the fall with a new layout.

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