Museo etnografico "Giovanni Podenzana"

The Ethnographic Museum, entitled to the ethnographer, naturalist and musician Giovanni Podenzana (1864-1943) is housed, since 2005, in the new premises of the former fifteenth-century oratory of San Bernardino, in the heart of La Spezia. It exhibits more than 3.500 ethnoanthropological objects  collected between late '800 and early `900 and relate to the traditions and customs of the communities from Lunigiana (from the eighteenth to the twentieth century) and native cultures of Oceania, New Guinea, the Americas, China, Japan and Africa (nineteenth century). Formed in the late '800, during the Positivism within the "Civic Museums" of La Spezia, the largest ethnoanthropological collection had a naturalistic local section, a section outside Europe, a historical section about Risorgimento and a section of physical anthropology. Considered one of the most important in Italy by type and variety of materials, is now offering a renewed exhibition, with a synthetic vision that documents rural society of the historical Lunigiana, with its oral traditions, rituals of magic-protective and clothing, deepened through an important section dedicated to the costumes and the weaving loom.