Museo Archeologico di Cremona

On the 31st of May 2009 it was opened the new Archaelogical Museum: it is located in St. Lorenzo's basilical church and in the annexed Meli chapel, dating back to the 15th century. The Museum represents the development of the old archaeological section of the civic museum and it completes the exhibition, now in Palazzo Affaitati, of the "historical" non territorial collections, starting from the legacy of the Marquess Ala Ponzone.The church of San Lorenzo, deconsacrated at the end of the 18th Century, was owned by the Benedictine Monastery and then by the Olivetani.The church has a three-nave layout and it dates back to a period around the beginning of the 13th century. It presents the peculiar characteristics of Romanic architecture, like the wide organization of the spaces and the typical decoration of the apsidal fornixes.

The Latin colonies of Cremona and Piacenza were deducted in 218 BC, as bulwark against the Gauls; in 190 BC, due to the decimation for wars and diseases, one was sent second wave of settlers. In the II century B.C. the relative tranquility brought the city to a significant economic level and cultural, and indeed in 1989, with the lex Iulia, it became municipium. In the civil war procedure followed by murder of Julius Caesar in 44 a.C., having sided for Marco Antonio instead that for Caesar Octavianus resulted in the confiscation of the lands and theirs redistribution to veterans Augustan; nevertheless, at the end of the first century B.C. the city had reached great prosperity economic, mirrored also in the renewal building, with the construction of numerous noble domus. Among the remarkable remains of at least two domus found in the restructuring of a nineteenth-century building in Via Colletta in 2014.

The domus of the Ninfeo of piazza Marconi is a exceptional example of the planimetric complexity that could reach them private homes. It occupied the whole insula (m80 x m80), developed, with a strong scenographic impact, on several terraced level and distributed around four spaces open colonnades, two gods which welcomed gardens with large pools of water and a monumental nymphaeum. From here it was possible to access the cubicula and triclinium, with panoramic view on the Po river, while on the floor below were the kitchens, handouts and others service environments.

In March 1836, in a field in Calvatone territory, in Cremona's Province, it was found fortuitously a Roman bronze statue representing Victory on a globe. The site is the ancient territory of Bedriacum, a flourishing small town along the ancient Postumia Road. The statue, that dates back precisely to the years from 161 to 169 a.C. (as it is testified by the inscription dedicated to the emperors Marco Aurelio and Lucio Vero), was sold to Prussia in 184: it was restored and then exhibited at the Berlin Museum. The copy of Cremona dates back to 1937, when the Committee for Stradivari Celebrations (that were held in that year) decided to offer the town this artwork that had become famous thanks to the presence of another copy, in plaster, at the "Augustea exhbition of the Roman period", opened in Rome in September 1937. 

Inside the museum, in the necropoli section, are exposed the slab of the funeral monument with the portrays of the Arruntii family, the funeral urns and the ceramic/glass/bronze (part of the funeral tools)

The Roman furniture was consisting of a few pieces of furniture: beds, places in the triclini or in the cubicula, tables and tables, stools and chairs, wardrobes and dressers. Their structure was for the most wood, then in perishable material that it is hardly preserved. They were however decorated from bronze elements, in precious metal e sometimes in bone, found in abundance in the domus of the Ninfeo.