博物馆 Saturnia. The Urban Museum - The Archaeological Museum

In the mid-nineteenth century, a first collection of archeological materials began its formation in Saturnia, through the work of Bernardino Ciacci, who together with his family had acquired the fiefdom of Saturnia from the Marquises Panciatichi Ximenes. As time passed, this private collection developed into a small but full-fledged Antiquarium.  The structure, located within the Sienese castle, which the Ciacci family had transformed into their residence, was opened to visitors by request, thanks to the family’s generosity and community spirit.  In 1978, the colleciton was sold to the Italian State, which first allotted it to the Archeological Museum of Grosseto, where it was on display for more than two decades, before finally returning in 2003 to the site where it had been formed, in the new Archeological Museum of Saturnia.

The collection includes materials of diverse provenance, discovered in the large estates belonging to the Ciacci family, in the territories of Saturnia and Pitigliano, but it also conserves an important nucleus from Sovana and other minor sites.  This material comes from donations by friends and acquaintances, or from reclamations that family members had made as Honorary Inspectors of the Superintendency, between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.  Since most of the detailed documentation regarding the origins of the majority of the pieces has been lost, these are now mainly presented in didactic exhibits, exemplifying the main types of ceramics production of this area, between the so-called “orientalising” Etruscan era, and the time of Romanisation: from “impasto” ware, to th bucchero pottery, to figurative painted vases and black glazed ceramics.  In 2016 the museum’s range was extended beyond the Archeological Museum, giving rise to the Urban Museum: an organised itinerary takes visitors through the principal archeological remains still visible in Saturnia’s historic centre. In tandem, the numerous architectural fragments, plaques, inscriptions, and other carved artifacts discovered during the past centuries in the town or in its immediate surroundings, have been organised and put on outdoor display in the flowerbeds of Piazza Vittorio Veneto, and in the gardens in front of the Civic Library, after many years of negligent dispersal through the town centre.

Saturnia, frazione del Comune di Manciano