When you visit a museum, ecstatically wandering around its rooms and gazing at ancient remnants, relics and works of art, you often forget what those objects really represent. They are so important because they directly connect the visitors with the past and unveil remote civilizations and disappeared populations.
You can live this extraordinary experience even if you visit one of the archaeological museums in the Pianura Veronese, where a huge quantity of relics are kept and exhibited: those relics were found during several twentieth-century excavations. Those archaeological remnants remind of the ancient history of this territory and they have allowed experts to trace the human evolution and the environmental transformations of the plain from the Neolithic Era to the Roman Age.
The museum “Centro Ambientale Archeologico ” in Legnago is undoubtedly the most important archaeological museum of the entire Pianura Veronese. It was set up inside the old military Austrian hospital and afterwards it was superbly restored. The place is not only a museum, but also a research, study, collection and conservation place. Furthermore, large rooms are used for didactic activities and conferences. The collections you can see at the archaeological museums in Gazzo Veronese and Isola della Scala are also very valuable.
Museums play a very important social role too, because they preserve the historical and cultural heritage of a community and its territory. The documents, photographs and ancient relics exhibited in the rooms keep historical traces and they result from a common history and collective identity to be passed onto future generations.
This idea inspired Maria Fioroni when she created and set a museum up inside her family’s nineteenth-century palace in the centre of Legnago. Run today by the Fioroni Foundation, the museum was initially filled with the private collections gathered by the founder-lady during her entire life: in the rooms of the museum there are gorgeous Roman Age remnants, medieval weapons, Renaissance ceramics and relics reminding of the twentieth-century Italian wars. But the finest jewel of the whole exhibition is the wing dedicated to the Risorgimento – one of the most remarkable collections of all the museums in Veneto: this collection tells, through precious and unique relics, about the historical epic of Risorgimento in the Pianura Veronese. Furthermore, the Fioroni Foundation keeps valuable archive material and documents made available to experts and admirers.
