ROME – The Felice Barnabei exhibition at the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia will be open until 30 August. An extension of nearly two months was announced on the museum’s website.

Exhibition “CENTUM DEINDE CENTUM. At the origins of national archeology” offers a journey through time to discover the figure of Felice Barnabei and his public engagement that led to the birth of the Villa Giulia Museum, but also about his closest and family relationships, which reveal the figure of an unusual person, an outstanding personality in the Italian scientific and political landscape.

100 years since the death of Felice Barnabei (Castelli, January 13, 1842 – Rome, October 29, 1922) was an archaeologist, Italian politician, member of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy, the exhibition focuses on a part of Italian history, as well as on the figure who was the witness and the protagonist. the complete establishment of archeology as a historical discipline and a pioneer of the concept of value enhancement and legal principles that still protect the cultural heritage in Italy and have become an international model.

After the “Barnaway Day” on October 29, 2022, held in National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia and dedicated to his most ambitious undertaking, the collection in one place of the antiquities that were discovered outside the walls of the capital, and consequently the founding of the National Etruscan Museum at the Villa Giulia in 1889, the exhibition recalls the commitments that Barnabey personally lavished so that museums would not only become guardians of protection, but also places of dissemination of scientific knowledge about cultural heritage in the highest collective interests.

Exhibition, curator Maria Paola Guidobaldi, Valentino Nice and Antonietta Simonelliwant to be an account of the articulate private and institutional history of Felice Barnabeifull of success, but also of bitterness, in which the personal history of an unusual person is intertwined with the history of the nation.

Charles Franz