Description of the attraction
After closing in 2000, the Ethnographic Museum of Rimini reopened its doors to the public, this time in the building of Villa Alvardo in the Covignano area. This is one of the main Italian museums dedicated entirely to the ethnological and archaeological aspects of the diverse peoples of Africa, Oceania, pre-Columbian America and partly Asia. After its reopening in December 2005, the museum received a new name - “Ethnographic collection of Rimini. Museum degli Sguardi . This renaming was initiated by the French anthropologist Marc Auget.
Today, the museum's collections are housed in an old and very valuable from an architectural point of view building built in 1721 - a villa designed for Giovanni Antonio Alvarado, who was the personal secretary of the Spanish emperor Charles VI in Italy. The villa has been renovated at the initiative of the municipality of Rimini. Nowadays, it contains about seven thousand artifacts belonging to the museum. Interestingly, the villa used to be part of another museum - Delle Grazie, which since 1928 was located in a Franciscan covered gallery. It contained objects collected by the Franciscan monks during their missions, some of which later became the property of the ethnographic museum. Particularly valuable are the exhibits relating to the history of the tribes of pre-Columbian America, which were scattered throughout the vast American continent before its conquest by the Spaniards in the 16th century. More recently, priceless artifacts from the Amazon basin have also been donated to the museum's collection.
