The thousand aspects of teaching at the museum: knowing the ancient through the Ongaro and Lazzarini collections.
A special section of the museum is intended to house the educational collections. These are mainly two collections donated respectively by Massimiliano Ongaro and Lorenzo Lazzarini. Some spaces also host small temporary exhibitions, usually deriving from research or thesis works. The main one is dedicated to inorganic pigments, used in the fresco technique. Although they are different from the collections usually displayed in archaeological museums, all have found a place in this university archaeological museum for their high educational value.
The Ongaro Collection
In the showcase facing the impluvium is exhibited the donation of ten Minoan casts that were acquired by Massimiliano Ongaro in 1915 during a mission to Crete on behalf of the Italian government.
The collection includes casts of famous artifacts from the early twentieth-century excavations in the island of Crete. In particular, the two statuettes of the “snake goddess” and the bull’s head rhyton (ritual vase) (1550-1500 BC) come from Knossos. From Phaistos comes the cast of the famous disc known precisely as the Phaistos Disc (late 17th century BC), from the palace of Hagia Triada derive the rhyton with fighting scenes, the one in the shape of an ostrich egg known as “of the harvesters” and the cup called “of the prince” (1550-1500 BC). The collection is completed by a statuette of a devotee from the 16th century BC, found in Tylissos.
The Lazzarini Collection
In 2008, Lorenzo Lazzarini, at the time professor and director of LAMA (Laboratory of Analysis of Ancient Marbles) at IUAV (University Institute of Architecture) in Venice, donated to the Museum a collection of samples in marble and stone used in ancient times for statuary and architectural decorations.
Decorative marble, widespread in the Roman world from the middle of the 1st century BC, assumed significant economic importance during the imperial age. However, from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, many marble coverings were dismantled and reused to build new civil and religious buildings.
The specimens in the collection, collected directly by Lazzarini in ancient quarries or modern ones in the same areas, give evidence of the progress in the study of these stone materials as the result of the integration of multidisciplinary techniques and approaches.
Lazzarini also donated a small group of ancient coins, including Magna Graecia, Roman, late antique and early medieval specimens, now exhibited next to the samples.