National Archaeological Museum of Naples: MANN2

The Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (MANN), renowned for its vast collection of classical archaeology, has embarked on an ambitious project to create MANN2, a new museum branch. The site for MANN2 will be the Real Albergo dei Poveri (Bourbon Hospice for the Poor), an unfinished, 430-room, 18th-century complex in central Naples known for having the longest façade of any European building. In 1749, Charles III of Bourbon commissioned the site as a social care project. However, the building was never fully completed. The complex was designed to house 8,000 people, with five courtyards and an entire church planned for the centre, but only three courtyards were built, and plans to complete the building were abandoned in 1819. It subsequently served various purposes, most notably as a hospital and juvenile detention site, with large vacant areas gradually deteriorating until the facade was restored in 2006. Now, the Italian Ministry of Culture has allocated €148 million to create MANN2 at the site (with €100 million from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience funding, PNRR). The scale of the building will allow the new museum to offer 10,000 square meters of much-needed exhibition space. MANN has long grappled with limited exhibition space and funding challenges, preventing a comprehensive display of its extensive collection. MANN is known for collecting artefacts from the Roman Empire, including the world’s most extensive Pompeii collection. While Pompeii attracts millions of visitors annually, many of its excavated artefacts remain in storage or private collections. MANN currently holds approximately 40,000 out of the 400,000 artefacts recovered from Pompeii. Limited exhibition space has prevented the museum from showcasing its collection, storing many holdings in ill-suited rooms secured with iron bars. MANN2 will allow MANN to display and store these objects and will primarily exhibit works from the Santangelo Collection, which comprises many artefacts from Pompeii and the surrounding region (Magna Graecia). Around half of the site will be transformed into teaching spaces and student dormitories for Naples’s Federico II University, a new site for the city’s National Library and a 10,000 sq. m exhibition space for MANN. Exhibits will include artefacts from MANN’s collection that are at present in storage—including pieces of lapillus from the eruption, ancient statues, home furnishings, keys and bags of silver and gold—as well as video projections, used to reconstruct the richly decorated interiors of ancient villas like the Temple of Isis and the House of the Citharist. Architecture firm ABDR was appointed to design the project. Renovation work began in April 2024 and is due to be complete by the middle of 2026. (Updated 24 July 2024)