Ostiense Museum
Silvana Editoriale 2024
English, German and Italian translations and editing of the new Guide to the Museo Ostiense by Scriptum
The Museo Ostiense is a jewel of the Ostia Antica archaeological park, located in the Renaissance Casone del Sale and now (in 2024) refurbished with completely new contents and forms.
The largest seaport in the Mediterranean (with the nearby ports of Claudius and Trajan), the beating heart of the Roman economic-productive and commercial system, Ostia gave birth to a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society, an unprecedented melting pot that perhaps only today returns to our globalised civilisation.
The first ambition of the new Museo Ostiense is to recompose, as never before and net of the albeit unavoidable museographic aspects, the network of relations, close and biunivocal, between the works and other objects on display and the urban, infrastructural and funerary contexts they pertain to.
The museum was founded in 1865 by archaeologist Pietro Ercole Visconti at the initiative of Pope Pius IX and began collecting statues and other sculptures found on the site. After the taking of Rome in 1870, the exhibits were moved to the nearby Castle of Julius II. Between the 1920s and 1930s, the extensive excavations of the Porto necropolis on the Isola Sacra and the Via Laurentina necropolis went hand in hand with the project to set up the Museo Ostiense inside the Casone del Sale, which archaeologist Guido Calza completed and inaugurated in 1934.