Keywords: colonial inheritance · museum of museums · counter-memory · opacity (Glissant) · thematic curation · restitution · Italian colonialism · EUR / Fascist heritage · non-Western art · museum studies · opus sectile · late antiquity · Ostia Antica

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Housed within the rationalist architecture of Rome's EUR district—built for the 1942 World Exposition that never took place—in 2016 the Museo delle Civiltà inherits collections from institutions including the former Colonial Museum, the National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography Luigi Pigorini, the National Museum of Oriental Art, and the National Museum of Middle Ages. Rather than concealing the origins of its most substantial collections, the museum makes them the subject of critical inquiry, operating as a "museum of and about museums" that surfaces the ideological conditions under which its collections were assembled.

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This reflexive approach is embodied in selected works throughout the galleries: Jermay Michael Gabriel's Yekatit 12 reconstructs a Fascist monument from Addis Ababa as an act of counter-memory; Cooking Sections' Rights to Seeds reframes colonial plant specimens as living matter for ecological restitution; and artist-in-residence Gala Porras-Kim interrogates the institutional intimacies of collection care. In the EUR_Asia galleries, 16 thematic narratives deliberately replace geographic hierarchies with cross-cultural dialogues on cosmology, the body, and knowledge.

 

The visit culminates in the extraordinary opus sectile of Porta Marina—a full reconstruction of a late 4th-century room from a monumental domus at Ostia Antica, its walls and floors still clad in the original colored marbles: red and green porphyry, giallo antico, pavonazzetto. Never spoliated because never completed, the room survived intact by accident of history, offering a rare and visceral encounter with the luxury material culture of the late-antique Mediterranean—a counterpoint, in its deep antiquity, to the museum's urgent contemporary reckonings.