The civic museum of Albano Laziale, founded in 1975, has been housed since 1983 in Villa Ferrajoli, a Neoclassical building in the Borgo Garibaldi district, in the centre of the town. It tells the story of the Alban Hills from prehistory to the Roman age, room by room.
What to see
The first rooms are devoted to the volcano and to prehistory: models of the volcanic materials of the Alban Hills, peperino, tuff, pozzolana and lava, a rare sample of latiumite, and a rock that engulfed plant remains and made it possible to date the last eruption of the Latium Volcano. Then come stone tools, a molar and two tusks of a straight-tusked elephant, and a mammoth molar. A whole room is given to the «villaggio delle macine», the pile-dwelling settlement found under the waters of Lake Albano, in the territory of Castel Gandolfo, with bronze spearheads, flint arrowheads, net weights and pottery.
Among the protohistoric pieces are the head of a Latin warrior in polychrome terracotta found at Castel Savello, attributed to the decoration of a temple, and almost a thousand votive objects discovered in via Sant'Ambrogio. The Roman rooms display finds from the villa of Pompey the Great, partly excavated in the park of Villa Doria: a female head in peperino and a marble portrait attributed to Tiberius Gemellus.
Visiting
Opening times, tickets and visits to the sites of the archaeological circuit should be checked on the official website of Albano's civic museums.
Our editors' tip
Look up in room III, the one used for lectures and teaching: the ceilings are decorated with grotesque frescoes by the nineteenth-century painter Giovanni Battista Caretti. The «villaggio delle macine», the village of the millstones, takes its name from the many millstones found on the site: once submerged, its remains are now on dry land, because the waters of the lake have receded.
