Museo Beltrami

Museum on the first floor of the Palazzo Beltrami-Luchetti in Filottrano, with American relics brought back by the explorer Giacomo Costantino Beltrami.

Opening hours unknown

Website Directions

About the museum

The Museo Beltrami was founded in 1979 on the initiative of Glauco Luchetti Gentiloni and occupies the first floor of the Palazzo Beltrami-Luchetti in Filottrano. Its work has attracted the interest of the Beltrami County Historical Society in Minnesota and of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Giacomo Costantino Beltrami, born in Bergamo, was a judge under Napoleon in Macerata. In 1823 he travelled up the upper course of the Mississippi and discovered its northern sources; between 1824 and 1825 he made a study trip to Mexico and then stayed in Haiti. In 1837 he returned to Filottrano, where he died in 1855 in a cell built in his palace.

In the reception hall, together with busts of the palace’s owners, items made by the indigenous peoples of North and Central America are displayed in cases: painted hides, bows and arrows, calumets, dagger sheaths, belts with rattles, bags and horn utensils; then Aztec and Mexican terracottas, engraved coconuts, stone axes, worked shells and painted gourds from Mesoamerica and Haiti. The adjoining rooms contain a Mexican herbarium, a mollusc collection, minerals from Mexican mines, weapons and personal objects, and the manuscript of the book “Le Mexique”, which Luchetti Gentiloni translated into Italian for the first time (2004 edition). Part of the original material has been lost, mainly through wartime events.

Highlights

Objects from the Great Plains tribes: painted hides, bows, calumets
Aztec and Mexican terracottas, painted gourds and engraved coconuts
Mexican herbarium, mollusc collection and minerals from Mexican mines
Manuscript of Beltrami’s “Le Mexique”
Housed in the Palazzo Beltrami-Luchetti, where the explorer spent his last years