(English) The Archaeological Museum of Florence a time travel

The Archaeological Museum is located off the  Santissima Annunziata square inside the Crocetta palace. The museum features a beautiful garden planted with Lebanon cedars, pines, cypresses, tamarisk, and magnolias. It is an outdoor museum with columns, sculptures, tombs, and vestiges of monuments of the ancient Etruscan civilization. The pieces of the Etruscan, Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman civilization held here have previously been preserved in the Palazzo Vecchio, the Uffizi Gallery.

There are three sections in the archaeological museum,  the Etruscan Topographic Section, the Etruscan-Greek-Hellenistic-Roman Section and the Egyptian Section. These sections contain ancient sculptures, medallions, portraits, clothes, urns, and sarcophagi.

In 1829, an Italian Egyptologist Ippolito Rosellini worked alongside Jean-François Champollion, the man who translated heiroglyphics! He returned home with a lot of treasures that were installed in the museum in the late 19th century; these include canopy vases, sarcophaghi, statues, mummies, stele (carved slabs), a wooden chariot from Tutankamon’s time, and various wooden and cane objects. Kids and adults will all love the fascinating rooms set up to evoke an Egyptian temple or a Pharoah’s tomb, with faux columns, heiroglyphics, and a ceiling painted to look like a starry night.

But the most important artefact is a  famous Etruscan bronze ought to call over hundreds of visitors. Found and sold at Arezzo in 1500 (thus its name), it is a large bronze wtih a lion’s head and body, a goat’s head on his back and a serpent’s tail. This mythological beast is the enemy of the hero Bellerofonte who rides winged Pegasus. On the Chimera’s rare leg we read an Etruscan inscription, tincsvil, which means gift or offering, in this case to the god Tinia, the Etruscan Zeus.