Post-War Reconstruction of Nemi Ships Museum: Pushing the Boundaries Between Museography and Memorialisation

The Nemi Ships Museum is an early and unique example of museum architecture for large archaeological objects, built to display two great ancient Roman ships extracted from Lake Nemi near Rome between 1928 and 1932. The history of the Museum is a significant case study depicting development of fascist propaganda through heritage politics, archaeology, museography, and construction. During WWII, the Museum was damaged by a devastating fire that destroyed the ships. After the war ended, it was renovated, hosting a new exhibition, which opened in 1953. The new intervention had to deal with the huge cultural loss with a combined strategy of in-scale reconstruction of the ships and the original setting, by displaying the surviving finds, revisiting the huge fascist endeavour, and memorialising destruction. Nemi Ships Museum new setting can be contextualised within the general process of museum reconstruction in post-war Italy. This paper uses documents and archival sources to reconstruct the key moments of the chronological and contextual development of the museum, contextualising them in the historical frames surrounding the story of Nemi Ships Museum and its post-war reconstruction. The claim is that this architecture represents both an early example of the renovation of museography in Italy following the 1934 Madrid Conference, and of a combined museal and memorial setting during Post-War Reconstruction.