The Guglielmo Massaia Ethiopian Museum - Frascati
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Set up inside the Capuchine Convent, the museum exhibits materials traditionally connected to the missionary activities of the cardinal Guglielmo Massaia (1809 – 1899) in Ethiopia, where he lived for as long as thirty five years (1846 – 1879) as head of the Apostolic Vicarship of Galla.
In actual fact the collection of ethnographic objects (weapons, drawings, costumes, craft products, photographs) from East Africa and mainly Ethiopia, was almost entirely collected from 1909 onwards by the Franciscan friar Gioacchino Farina and displayed in the rooms where the friar lived on his return from his mission. The collection was intended on the one hand to honour the memory of the missionary and on the other to create a cultural institution which could attract attention to this African region in direct connection to the Colonial policies of the time, to which, it was hoped, the friar’s missionary activities could also be assimilated.
Particularly worthy of note are an ornamental fan in vegetable fibre and wood and a black lace mantle with floral decorations which belonged to Queen Taitù, the ornaments of the red silk and velvet wedding dress of the daughter of the King of Kaffa, and objects, photos and documents that had belonged to Massaia, including his writing desk. The museum also contains a number of tools and musical instruments and a few remarkable naturalistic items such as a rhinoceros horn, the jaws of a lion, a warthog tooth, a few ostrich eggs, the shell of an armadillo and a spine of a sawfish.
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