The Museo del Territorio Biellese was inaugurated in the current location of the former Convent of San Sebastiano in 2001. The Museum houses the civic collections that have been enriched since the second half of the 19th century through findings in the territory, donations, bequests, and deposits. The heterogeneous museum heritage has allowed the visit itinerary to be articulated through the Paleontological, Archaeological, Egyptian, Pre-Columbian, and Historical-Artistic sections. The Paleontological section illustrates how up to 2 and a half million years ago the sea occupied vast areas of the Biellese region, connecting with the Moving on water section, whose undisputed protagonist is the Roman monoxylous dugout canoe found in the Bertignano pond.
In the large hall hosting the archaeological collections, a chronological path, articulated in several rooms, unfolds over time from Prehistory to the Middle Ages: from protohistoric finds from Viverone and Burcina, to the history of the exploitation of gold mines in Bessa by the Celts and later by the Romans, to the Roman necropolises of Biella and Cerrione, with its inscriptions in leponzio, leading to the Medieval section highlighting the discoveries on Mount Rubello that tell the story of Fra’ Dolcino.
To complement the archaeological heritage, two important sections resulting from donations by illustrious citizens of Biella: the Egyptian room, closely linked to two famous Biellese citizens, Corradino Sella and Ernesto Schiaparelli, which houses and enhances, among others, the mummy of Taaset and her magnificent wooden sarcophagus, and the Pre-Columbian Cultures room, resulting from the donation by the Biellese entrepreneur Ugo Canepa. The artifacts belong to the cultures that flourished in Mesoamerica, the Intermediate area (Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua), and the Andean territories before the arrival of the Conquistadors, allowing insight into the knowledge and life habits of ethnic-cultural groups settled in the territories ranging from Mexico to Peru, from the 1st millennium BC to the Spanish conquest. The visit continues with the historical-artistic collections. In the large hall on the first floor, starting from the pictorial testimonies of the 12th century, it is possible to follow the evolution of figurative culture and local collecting taste with 16th-century works from the most illustrious Vercelli workshops and Caravaggesque paintings or 18th-century Venetian school paintings.
The 19th and 20th-century collections, resulting from private donations, present Piedmontese landscape painting with remarkable paintings by Antonio Fontanesi, Marco Calderini, Giovanni Giani, and Giovanni Piumati, and place Lorenzo Delleani, a native of Pollone and one of the greatest exponents of landscape painting of his time, in a broader artistic-cultural context.
The Museum houses the divisionist masterpiece "Reflections of a Hungry Man" by Emilio Longoni, which opens the path dedicated to Biellese collecting, from which works by Carlo Carrà, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, to the major exponents of the historical Avant-gardes of the first half of the 20th century, such as René Magritte, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Joan Mirò, and compatriots Giacomo Balla and Lucio Fontana.