The Castle Museum. "Ubaldo Formentini" Archeological Collections

The Formentini civic museum was set up in 1873 in the Italian post-unity period when many cities were engaged in confirming their historical and cultural image, entrusting it to a museum, the very essence of a place of sacred memories.
As we have already seen, in La Spezia this was also a period of great change, as the Old Town was being expanded and altered by the works to build the great Naval Arsenal. It was exactly these works that contributed towards bringing to light a buried world bearing witness both of a naturalistic and archaeological nature and confirming the ancient settlements in the La Spezia gulf and its hinterland: the museum preserves objects coming from historical Lunigiana, a large region with its own precise cultural identity and boundaries not officially recognized nowadays.
The Civic Archaeological Collections were moved only very recently due to the need to find a worthy place for the large section already on display on the bottom floor of the actual “Podenzana” museum. The finds displayed in this manner in the restored castle are an essential tour for learning about the settlements and exploitation of the Lunigiana region, starting from prehistoric times up until the middle ages, a tour supplemented and linked with the historical site housing the museum, that is to say precisely the castle itself.
To start with, we have relics proving that human beings already inhabited the coast and the hinterland from the Copper Age, i.e. in the IV millennium B.C., where simple funeral accessories are evidence of the rite of collective burials in natural grottos. The first of the extraordinary stelae-statues produced also date back to this period: female, male and asexual anthropomorphous sculptures, once used to guard a territory, with weapons and jewelled ornaments and a surprisingly well-defined social position. Amongst them the fragments of a head found at Verrucola, with its sharp penetrating expression, is almost a heraldic and characteristic emblem of this far distant peoples.
After a pause in production the stelae statues were produced again as from the mid Iron Age: in contact with the Etruscan civilization and close to the Roman rule over the territory, the ancient stones are scraped and engraved and are now a method for offending and not just for defending as they grasp their weapons that were once only a symbol of social power and dignity.
Agricultural and pastoral life is evidenced by particular defensive works (named castellari), constructions built on high ground during the Bronze Age and recovered every time a fortress was needed for defence, and by the cist tombs: six slabs, originally stone-made, they became clay works under the influence of Roman culture. They contained the ashes of the dead and relevant funeral accessories.
The greater part of the Fabbricotti collection is housed in the upper part of the castle, that is to say the vast collection of Roman objects from the Lunigiana area, which originally belonged to the Fabbricotti family and was passed on to the La Spezia council in 1939. Luni, the resplendent sister of the sun, the brilliantly white city, still compared to uncontaminated snow in the V century A.C. and which by this time was disintegrating into the green of the countryside, furnished an exciting store of finds illustrating with great precision both the public official life as well as the more daily routine aspects of the community that lived there. The architectural section, the room devoted to cults, in particular funeral rites, the instrumenta domestica (domestic utensils), the statues and portraits, the mosaics and collections of ancient inscriptions, up to the extraordinary Byzantine and Carolingian marble fragments coming from the lost Luni cathedral, guarantee a fascinating tour into Roman art and culture until they were incorporated by other cultures after the fall of the Empire.
Lastly one can enjoy a view of the whole of the Gulf, its hills and the perpetual brilliance of the Apuane Alps from the castle terraces.