MAO – Museo d’Arte Orientale

The MAO aspires to the broadest representation of the artistic production of the various countries of Asia. The museum houses the most important cultural and artistic traditions of that continent.
The MAO collections consist of almost 2300 works. They cover a time span from the Neolithic to the beginning of the last century. To these are added more than 1400 excavated finds from the pre-Islamic period from the Iraqi excavations in Seleucia and Coche.
The rooms for the permanent exhibition are distributed in five separate galleries corresponding to five cultural areas: South Asia and South East Asia, with works from the Indian subcontinent and Indochina; China, cradle of a centuries-old and protean artistic civilisation; the Himalayan region, a fertile place of interaction between Indian and Chinese cultures; Japan, the site of original developments born of the encounter with the cultures of Asia and Europe; the Islamic countries, witness to an extraordinary artistic flowering extending from Central Asia to the Mediterranean.