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National Archaeological Museum of Adria

The new Roman Section, inaugurated on March 28, crowns and completes the total renovation project of the National Archaeological Museum of Adria, promoted by the Superintendence for Archaeological Heritage of the Veneto.

It took seven years of work and huge investments (thanks to the contributions of Gioco del Lotto, Arcus S.p.A. and the Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo Foundation) to finally complete the National Museum located on the great Po Delta.

60 thousand artefacts have found a home there, obviously only partially exposed, all documents of the history of a city and a territory which have given their name to a sea and which have seen 2500 years of civilization stratified, from the Venetians, to the Greeks, to the Etruscans, to the Romans. Finds, sometimes absolutely exceptional and unique, returned from the silt of what has rightly been defined as "the Mesopotamia of Italy".

The National Archaeological Museum of Adria is a museum based in Adria, in via Giacomo Badini, a museum inaugurated in 1961. It preserves finds from the collection of the Bocchi family and from the archaeological areas of the pre-Roman era (especially evidence of the first Greek emporium and the consequent Etruscan city) and Roman discovered in the surroundings of the city.

Since December 2014 the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities has managed it through the Veneto Museum Centre, which in December 2019 became the Regional Museums Directorate.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the administration of the municipality of Adria decided to purchase from the Bocchi family the documents, manuscripts, archaeological finds and everything else they managed to collect for their studies focused on the history of the city collected between the 18th and the 19th centuries century by Ottavio (1697-1749), Francesco Girolamo (1748-1810) and Francesco Antonio (1828-1888).

The idea of setting up a domestic museum to be visited by antiquity enthusiasts came from Francesco Girolamo Bocchi, who began recording the names of visitors in 1787.

Among the guests stand out the archdukes of Austria, Francis Charles with his wife Sofia of Bavaria, and Theodor Mommsen, the famous German epigraphist. Francesco Antonio Bocchi, following his appointment as Inspector of Excavations and Findings of the Polesine, undertook the excavations where the museum stands today, recovering Etruscan and Roman finds.

Map: National Archaeological Museum of Adria