Torcello Museum

The Torcello Museum , owned by the Metropolitan City of Venice and housed in the buildings once the seat of the civil power of the island, is organized into two sections: the Archaeological section which is located in the Archives building , with a loggia on the ground floor and large three-light window on the upper floor; the Medievale e Moderna which is instead located in the Palazzo del Consiglio, a fourteenth-century Gothic-style structure with mullioned windows and a small tower with bell.

The institution of the Torcello Museum , commissioned in 1870 by the Prefect of Venice Luigi Torelli and by Nicolò Battaglini , its first director, aims to save from total dispersion the evidence of the history of an island which - if it appeared in those years abandoned and impoverished also of its community - it had been one of the first lagoon settlements, a landing and trading structure linked to Altino, a bishopric, a prosperous and productive city.

Donated to the Province of Venice in 1874, the original museum was enriched in 1889 with the Palazzo dell'Archivio and a second collection, as a gift from the new director Cesare Augusto Levi. In 1913 the two collections merged and were then chronologically reorganized into two sections in the years 1929-30.

The current exhibition has confirmed the chronological distinction in the two exhibition sections by suggesting a path that, starting from the findings that attest to commercial exchanges in the lagoon already in the Mycenaean era, winds through Venetian, pre-Roman and Roman, Byzantine and early medieval testimonies and crosses glorious times of the Serenissima to reach up to the nineteenth century.

The Archaeological Section offers finds from the Paleolithic to the late Roman period , preserves examples of Greek, Italiot and Etruscan ceramics and Roman ceramics; protohistoric and Roman bronzes for cultural , personal and ornamental use as fibulae and mirrors; examples of small Greek sculpture, Roman copies and reworkings of Greek originals, funerary monuments, portraits urns, altars and memorials.

The Medieval and Modern Section exhibits works and documents dating from the 6th to the 19th century .

Plutei, capitals and architectural fragments, including inscriptions, follow the changing styles and decorative motifs in the building. Significant testimonies of the island's past are the fragments of wall mosaic and the altarpiece in gilded silver from the 13th century , coming from the Basilica, and the lying wooden tattoo of Santa Fosca . The paintings of the Veronese school with the stories of Santa Cristina, the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi belonged to the Church of S. Antonio (now destroyed).

How to get

ACTV public navigation service: line 12 VENICE (F.te Nove) - MURANO - MAZZORBO - BURANO - TREPORTI - PUNTA SABBIONI (and vice versa) and line 9 Burano - Torcello (and vice versa) with change in Burano.