Museo Castiglioni

The Castiglioni Museum was born from Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni's donation to the City of Varese of thousands of precious artefacts collected in Africa in over sixty years of ethnological and archaeological research missions.
In the course of dozens of expeditions, the Castiglion brothers approached numerous ethnic groups that had kept their culture intact until the 1960s and 1970s, carried out in-depth archaeological research in the Sahara desert and produced precise photo-cinematographic documentation, now unrepeatable, that forms part of the museum's heritage and allows visitors to 'immerse themselves' in a distant and now vanished world.
The museum, housed in the annexe of Villa Toeplitz in one of Italy's most beautiful parks, offers an interactive visit thanks to sounds, films, colours and multimedia systems.
There are four main sections: the prehistoric Sahara Desert, the historical Sahara Desert, the recent Sahara Desert, and the African Savannah.
In the rooms of the Museum, visitors can discover how gold was mined in Pharaonic times in the Sudanese Nubian Desert where the Castiglioni brothers found, in 1989, the city of Berenice Pancrisia mentioned, among others, by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia.
You will be able to admire the collection of casts of prehistoric graffiti from the Libyan Fezzan; works of art from over 10,000 years ago of exceptional workmanship and beauty, a worldwide unique.
You can observe the busts adorned with the colourful jewellery and elaborate hairstyles of the Nilo Camiti, shepherds of the eastern savannah. Again, exhibits found only in this museum.
You will be able to discover a Tuareg camp, a find that is unequalled in quality and variety of exhibits.