Narra of a “place” suspended between water and land that over the centuries has changed, transformed by natural phenomena and human action. A path that, starting from findings that attest to the intense commercial exchanges involving the lagoon and its inhabitants already in the Mycenaean era (2nd millennium BC), unfolds between Venetian, pre-Roman and Roman, Byzantine, and early medieval testimonies and crosses the glorious times of the Serenissima to reach the 19th century.
The Archaeological Section collects artifacts from discoveries in the lagoon area and from the Altinate countryside accompanied by works that arrived at the Museum from private collections, such as the collection of Egyptian statuettes in bronze and ceramics, covering a chronological range from the Paleolithic to late Roman times. Large is the collection of Greek, Italiote, and Etruscan ceramics from the 7th to the 4th century BC, presenting various decorative types and production techniques.
The Roman ceramics consist of a small but significant core: cooking and tableware for funerary use, glasses and cups, various types of oil lamps. Of cultual and funerary use are the protohistoric bronzes with human and animal figures of Etruscan, Italic, and Paleovenetian production, to which personal and ornamental use objects such as fibulae and mirrors are added. Of Roman times, instead, are the small bronzes with a sacred character from domestic lararia and table objects and tools, as well as figurated slabs and antefixes coming from sanctuaries in central and southern Italy.
Small Greek sculpture works arrived in Torcello via Venetian collecting. Roman copies and reworkings of Greek originals, funerary monuments, and portraits from the Altinate area, urns are and cippi complete the sculpture collection of the archaeological section.
The Medieval and Modern Section exhibits works and documents dated from the 6th century to the 19th century. Stone materials and architectural fragments testify to the deep cultural and artistic ties with the Byzantine Empire, both with the presence of works produced in the East, such as the splendid 6th-century holy water font or the collection of encolpia, medals, and bronze fibulae, as well as with the persistence and reuse of Byzantine decorative models in locally produced objects. From the Basilica of Torcello came to the museum fragments of the wall decoration of splendid craftsmanship and the 13th-century gilded silver Altarpiece, a rare surviving example, though incomplete, of a church furnishing widespread in the lagoon area.
Wooden sculptures from the lagoon area, Byzantine icons, and panel paintings from the 14th and 15th centuries with sacred subjects find their best examples in the polychrome and gilded bas-relief depicting a “Pietà” and in the panel with the Passing Christ showing clear Tuscan influences. From Torcello, gone, its demolished churches, we have memory in the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Monochromes with stories of the Virgin, and the stories of Saint Christina from the Veronese workshop, coming from the Church of St. Anthony in Torcello.
Of the social and productive life of Torcello and the nearby now-submerged islands, echoes remain in fragments of everyday ceramics, coins, glass, cooking tripods, and factory waste, memory of workshops and active kilns.
