Il National Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions is the only state museum in Italy with specific expertise in the field of demo-ethno-anthropological subjects. Its purpose is the documentation of the popular traditions of all Italian regions and it preserves over one hundred thousand documents, acquired from 1906 to the present.
The Museum was born from the Italian Ethnography Exhibition held in Rome in 1911 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Unification of Italy and had as its founder Lamberto Loria (1855-1913), ethnologist, who after carrying out numerous study expeditions in extra-European countries, realized, during a short stay in Sannio, that even in early twentieth-century Italy ethnographic research was needed. It was indeed necessary to document that agro-pastoral culture which at the time was undergoing great changes due to the progressive industrialization of nearby and distant areas and the consequent migration from rural centers.
All the documentary material of the Museum is currently accessible to the public through numerous services: the library, the historical archive that preserves documents related to the acquisition of objects, the print cabinet, the photographic archive, the sound archive, the visual anthropology archive, the ethnographic deposits, the inventory cataloging and loans office, the restoration laboratory and the audiovisual laboratory. The Museum, in fact, due to its specificity and uniqueness throughout the national territory, is also a center for data collection, research, and documentation.
