What you see

The ground floor’s three prehistoric rooms display facies of Palma Campania alongside experimental facial reconstructions from the necropolis of San Paolo Belsito and a reconstructed hut from the Pope’s Village of Croce di Nola. The Orientalizing section showcases funerary objects from the Torricelle necropolis, dating to the eighth and seventh centuries BC.

Upper galleries present refigured Greek pottery, including the distinctive Pilaster with the Owl produced locally in the fifth century BC. The fourth-century BC heroized portrait of a knight in a horned helmet, painted on a semi-chamber tomb slab, epitomizes the Hellenized warrior elite. Roman galleries feature limestone togates and Attis statues from funerary monuments, an imposing Trajan-period Lorica statue, and a Nilotic mosaic fountain from a third-century villa on Via San Paolo Belsito.

Later sections contain early Christian marble pluteus fragments and pillars from the Basilica of San Felice in Cimitile, Renaissance polychrome marbles from Santa Maria la Nova’s altar, Giovanni Angelo D’Amato’s Annunciation, and a work attributed to Giovanni Andrea Taurella. The mezzanine houses nearly 1,000 Neapolitan riggiole ceramics and faience spanning the fifteenth century to the present.