This unusual museum-dome, housed in a neo-Gothic castle, offers the extraordinary opportunity to enter the home of Captain Enrico Alberto D’Albertis, its creator, who donated it to the city upon his death in 1932. Travelling by sea and land between the 19th and 20th centuries, he enclosed his world in a romantic setting, among "chambers of wonders", maritime suggestions, Colombian evocations and colonial trophies.
His castle, as documented by the construction drawings, bears witness to the fascination of distant worlds on his spirit, imbued with "Genoeseness" and love for the sea and an equal curiosity for the unknown and the untried.
The museum’s collections, presented in a succession of rooms furnished "in style" and characterized by a taste for "revival", consist of ethnographic and archaeological material collected on five continents by the Captain, to which are added those of his cousin Luigi Maria, the first explorer of the Fly River in New Guinea (1872-1878).
With the entrance to the sixteenth-century bastion on which the castle stands, a new tour opens up through further non-European acquisitions of the last century by the city with pre-Columbian archaeological finds from Central and South America, ethnographic materials from Canada donated by the American Catholic Missions after the exhibition at the Colombian celebrations of 1892, revisited with an extraordinary display through a dialogue with the people of origin.
