Museo di Antropologia ed Etnografia

University museum with human remains from ancient Egypt, ethnographic collections from around the world and an Art Brut collection; currently closed to the public.

Temporarily closed

Website Directions

Temporarily closed. The museum is currently closed to the public and accessible only for research purposes; the move to the new spaces of the Palazzo degli Istituti Anatomici is under way. Guided visits to the storerooms and meetings are offered occasionally.

About the museum

The Museo di Antropologia ed Etnografia (MAET) was founded in 1926, linked to the university institute of the same name established in 1923 at Palazzo Carignano. Its founder, Giovanni Marro (1875–1952), a psychiatrist and lecturer in anthropology, gathered human remains (skulls, skeletons and mummified bodies) from the excavations in Egypt of the Italian Archaeological Mission led by Ernesto Schiaparelli and later by Giulio Farina, together with ethnographic collections of various origins and objects made by patients of the Turin asylums directed by his father Antonio Marro.

In 1936 the museum moved to the former Ospedale San Giovanni Battista; during the war the collections were rescued outside the city. After 1945 the reorganisation was entrusted to Savina Fumagalli and, from the 1960s, to Brunetto Chiarelli. In 1984 the museum had to close to the public because the premises no longer met the new safety regulations, while research projects, in particular on the Egyptian anthropological collection, remained active. Since 2014 the MAET has been part of the Sistema museale di Ateneo of the University of Turin.

Since 2017, under the direction of Cecilia Pennacini, the move to the new spaces of the Palazzo degli Istituti Anatomici has been in progress, along with the study and cataloguing of the entire heritage and its enhancement through exhibitions, guided visits to the storerooms and meetings in person and online. The museum is currently closed to the public and is accessible for research purposes.