Aquileia Museum of Archaeology Aquileia

The Museum, located in the ancient villa of Faraone Cassis, hosts several sets of finds. The Institution collected them in the course of the last three centuries and put them on show around the half of 1900, according to updated museum displaying criteria. The exposition is on three floors and comprises also a sort of epigraphic garden, in fact a double arcade.

The ground floor has 4 rooms and is dedicated exclusively to works of sculpture, mainly funerary: busts, whole figure statues, steles, etc, often strictly related to other displayed relevant craftworks coming directly from Rome. Visitors will be fascinated by the representative busts, extremely expressive (in particular the so-called "old man of Aquileia"), in the first room, or by the eccentric cinerary urn placed in the middle of the third room: it is painted with the scene of a banquet where characters, notwithstanding the presence of a dead person, not only lay on the triclinium eating and joyfully celebrating sorrounded by their servants and a musician, but also make explicit gestures to ward off the spectre of death.

The upper floor, divided in five rooms, shows the development and the very high level of skilfulness reached in the so called minor crafts. Amidst objects used every day, such as lamps, leather bags, amphoras (room of fictile craftworks), or fibulas, mirrors and strigils (room of metal craftworks) visitors will admire marvellous cameos, small balm vases of coloured blown glass or the astonishing jewels in glass pulp. The top floor is dedicated to house tools and coins.

Outside, the arcades sorround the Curii funerary niche (second half of the 1st century a.C.). Under the arcade there are monumental architectonic elements, epigraphes, altars, funerary statues and wonderful mosaics. Among the latter ones, mention goes to the richly decorated treshold, with a vine and an ivy branch twisted together and knotted by a swelling red and white ribbon, as well as to the fragment representing an asárotos óikos or unswept floor, where leftovers like fish bones, fruit peels or fruit leaves were thrown; it was evidence of the richness of the house owners, who could afford throwing away food leftovers. Finally, the last room puts on show one of the ships with flat bottom that used to sail upriver on the Natissa, found in the area of Monfalcone at the beginning of the 70s.