Museo di Archeologia dell’Università di Pavia

The Museum of Archaeology was founded in 1820 and is one of the oldest university archaeological collections in Italy. The collection, created for educational and study purposes, exhibits different classes of materials, representative of various civilisations and epochs, from prehistory to late antiquity, in accordance with the didactic-scientific principle established from the outset by its founder Pietro Vittorio Aldini, the first professor of Archaeology at the University of Pavia, one of the oldest chairs of this subject in Italy. Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman civilisations are well illustrated through significant finds. The Museum is housed in an architecturally valuable container: the Sala della Crociera of the 15th-century San Matteo Hospital, which preserves four sections of the original wooden ceiling and a Baroque dome from 1770. The museum exhibits a Roman 2nd century A.D. copy of the head of Aphrodite Sosandra of the highest quality. The bronze original by the sculptor Calamide (ca. 460 BC) was located in the Propylaea of the Acropolis in Athens. A rich collection of plaster casts and reproductions of the most famous Greek statuary completes the collection. The museum, previously reserved exclusively for students and scholars, has been open to the public continuously since 2015 and is currently undergoing a reorganisation and refurbishment, with study, restoration and enhancement of the exhibits. It also has a Renaissance section with fictile artefacts and parts of architectural components, set up in a 15th-century loggia, known as the Loggetta Sforzesca.