Ingresso Museo Africano

The Ma-Museo Africano dei Missionari Comboniani, was born from an intuition of his first successor, Bishop Francesco Sogaro.

The first objects sent to Verona by the missionaries were displayed in a room of the large building of the Institute’s ‘Casa Madre’. It had to wait another twenty years, in 1938, to decide to establish the African Museum in Verona. The initiative had a purely missionary character: to offer a showcase of the activities of Comboni missionaries in Africa. The real revolution of the Museum took place in the early seventies, when it was decided to make it an open space and educational tool for those who wished to know Africa. In a few years, the Museum was transformed into a place of ethno-anthropological study on Africa, also through the Library of Nigrizia (rich of about 20,000 volumes). Students of all degrees had the opportunity to carry out research and prepare thesis on topics of ethno-anthropological interest.

Students of all levels had the opportunity to carry out research and prepare degree theses on topics of ethno-anthropological interest. The following years saw an important involvement of anthropologists, researchers and experts of African cultures. Although available to all types of visitors, the Museum opened up more and more to the world of school and university. In 1996 there was a further renewal to respond to new sensitivities and new ways of confronting Africa. Since then, while continuing to be an ‘ethnographic showcase’ for knowledge of Africa, the Museum has acquired new vitality, to take root in the territory and become a real instrument of intercultural dialogue. Internally renovated, it offered visitors multimedia paths, integrating them with ‘live’ side activities, such as the setting up of exhibitions and the organization of educational workshops in which students could express their creativity in encountering other cultures.

In 2006, the Museum was further renovated. The museum route was intended to illustrate the anthropological vision in traditional Africa, telling life through the reconstruction of the fundamental stages of human existence. The challenge of the new project of the Museum (renewed in the summer of 2014 under the direction of Father V. Milani) is to make dialogue between the languages expressed in the rich ethno-anthropological collection, composed of the objects that the Comboni Missionaries have collected in many countries, in the lands and among the people where they served, with technology and new video and multimedia languages to update, present and contextualize the many complexities and diversity of African realities. The architectural project was curated by Architect Mauro Del Maro, the multimedia project and video contributions are by Massimiliano Troiani, the decorative aspect is by Laura Fasciolo.