Located right in the heart of the historic centre of Castiglion Fiorentino and within the Sistema Museale Castiglionese, the first Italian museum completely dedicated to the medals of the Napoleonic Age, the MMEN Museo Medagliere dell’Europa Napoleonica displays a unique collection of more than 1,000 examples that retraces European history in the years from the French Revolution to the restoration after Napoleon’s fall and death.
In those years all the courts had artists and engravers with them specifically charged with celebrating the main military and non-military events in metal. The French revolutionaries themselves did not abandon this tradition by minting hundreds of medals and tokens aimed at celebrating all the conquests of freedom that followed since the opening of the General States.
Unlike the majority of traditional medal collections, normally concentrated exclusively on the minting of individual countries (first and foremost France and England), in the collection kept at the Medagliere, on the other hand, there are pieces produced throughout Europe showing how the same events can be seen in a diametrically opposed way. Examples of this are the examples of the years of the revolution in which the French pieces glorify the triumph of freedom from the old oppressive sludge, while the English or Austrian ones recall the unjust and brutal sacrifice of the legitimate sovereigns: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
The whole Napoleonic epic is then narrated in a succession of snapshots of history, from the first victories of the young Corsican general to the coronation, until the defeat in Russia and then the final fall after the historic Battle of Waterloo.
The last section of the collection then collects the medals minted after Napoleon’s death in St. Helena (with a rich section dedicated to the medals minted in 1840 when his mortal remains were able to return to Paris for final burial), forming an integral part of the process of his mythification and glorification which still today makes him one of the most followed and admired historical figures.
