Vatican Museums

For over two centuries an integral part of the Vatican heritage, the Profane Museum (1761) represents an important testimony to the pontifical interest in “antiquity”. Thanks to a major study and cataloguing project, its collections now find a new form of appreciation.

On Thursday 5 June 2025, in the Conference Hall of the Vatican Museums, the book Le Raccolte del Museo Profano, I. Antichità preromane e romane fino alla media età repubblicana (The Collections of the Profane Museum, I. Pre-Roman and Roman antiquities Up to the Middle Republican Age), edited by Claudia Lega, published by Edizioni Musei Vaticani, will be presented.

Divided into two volumes, with a total of 792 pages and 870 illustrations, the book is the result of a years-long project uniting scientific rigour, in-depth diagnostics and a refined editorial layout. The archaeological finds described cover a chronological span from pre-Roman cultures to the second century B.C., offering an organic corpus of Etruscan, Italic and Roman materials, completed by a section devoted to nineteenth-century manufactured specimens recognized as fakes.
The editorial project is part of a new scientific series of the Catalogues of the Collections of the Vatican Museums, conceived in order to make up-to-date study tools on the various collections available to the scientific community and to the public, thus contributing to the consolidation of the role of the Vatican Museums as an international centre for research, conservation and the propagation of cultural heritage.

The speakers at the event will be Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, together with Claudia Lega, Luca Pesante, Maurizio Sannibale of the Vatican Museums and Alessandro Naso of the University of Naples Federico II, scholars involved in the development of the book.