The Ceselli museum is hosted in the buildings of the “ex cantinone” of the Santa Scolastica Monastery near Subiaco; the renovation of the rooms and the actual setting up of the museum was carried out by the Province of Rome and the Archaeological Superintendence for Lazio, for the Jubilee in 2000.
The Ceselli collection is composed of archaeological and anthropological material that has been gathered since 1837, initially by Luigi Ceselli, Captain of the Engineers for the Papal States and a prominent exponent of the birth of Palaethnology in the second half of the 1800s, together with a group of scholars in Rome.
The collection was passed down, after 1882, to his son Marco who donated it to the Santa Scolastica Monastery to honour the memory of his uncle Mariano, a Benedictine monk.
The museum’s entrance hall of is dedicated to the figure of Ceselli, with the presentation of relics and his original publications; these are followed by the palaeontology, prehistoric and protohistoric sections, and then the pre-Roman and Roman ones.
The museum has recently been enhanced with a section containing material coming from recent digs carried out by the Archaeological Superintendence for Lazio (1994-1996) in the Filerone Villa built, before 60 A.D., in the deep gorge on the river Aniene, between mounts Taleo and Francolino; the latter anticipated the development of the future museum, set to become an exhibitive centre in the “territory”, to illustrate evolution of the settlements in the valley of the Aniene river in antiquity.    

Galleria fotografica