Knowledge Sharing Platform

in Florence, Italy.

The Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, founded in Florence by Paolo Mantegazza in 1869 as a section of the Museum of Natural History, is one of the most important anthropological museums in Europe. It houses more than 25.000 objects of ethnological interest and about 7.000 anthropological finds, plaster casts, hair. Its holdings include an important collection for Captian Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific as well as numerous others of particular interest.  A brief outline of the directors who oversaw its development and of the major collections they assembled will suggest the complexity and diversity of the collections. In 1869 Mantegazza, having gathered together the paleo-ethnological collection of R. Foresi, the early anatomical collections, and the collection of the "Tools of Barbaric Nations,” obtained institutional recognition of the museum by Royal Decree.  He considered Anthropology "the natural History of man" and collected anything which would illustrate the usages and customs of peoples and the anatomical differences between humans and primates. Mantegazza died in 1910 and Aldobrandino Mochi succeed him and supervised the transfer of the collections to their present site in the Palazzo Nonfinito. In 1913 Nello Puccioni succeeded Mochi, and it was during this period that the anthropological and ethnographic explorations of the Italian colonies were completed. In 1937 the directorship passed to Lidio Cipriani who enriched the museum with material from south-central Africa.  Giuseppe Genna took the museum through the difficult period of the second world war.  In the post-war period new acquisitions reached the museum, such as the casts of the skulls of the Medici family and, in 1948, the Hokkaido Ainu collection collected  and donated by Fosco Maraini.  In 1950 Galileo Chini, who had been a court artist in Bangkok in 1911, donated material from Siam which he had collected. In 1955, the new director, Paolo Graziosi gathered material pertaining to Kafirs of Chitarl in Pakistan  obtained during an expedition to Karakorum.