Reassessing two nineteenth-century proto-ethnographic collections in Italian museums

Abstract

Abstract Overshadowed by the immense cultural patrimony of Italy, within its extensive museum systems, many historically significant nineteenth-century Italian ethnographic collections from non-western peoples have remained ‘dormant’ and largely unknown to museum scholars until recently. The world’s first ‘museum of anthropology’ was founded in Florence, in 1869. By then Italian explorers and collectors had already assembled extensive collections that may be considered ‘proto-ethnographic’. This paper reassesses two exemplary proto-ethnographic collections by Giacomo Costantino Beltrami (1779–1855) from the Upper Mississippi region, and by Antonio Spagni (1809–1873) in the Upper Missouri River basin. In recent years, largely outside Italy, new uses for legacy museum collections have arisen. This has in turn had a strong effect on the organizational structures and approaches of Italian museums to their historic ethnographic collections.