The 19th-century exhibition design of the Museo Nazionale in Naples lives again in views of the rooms, groupings of objects, display cases and images that restore the memory of exhibitions, museum interiors, decorations, furnishings: a way of preserving, cataloguing and exhibiting that was part of a museum culture at a time when the rooms were conceived as chambers of wonders, crammed with artworks.
The volume, mainly photographic, offers an important contribution to the history of European museum design, as well as that of the taste and museology of the day. It presents 40 previously unpublished photographic views – including those taken by James Walker and William Henry Goodyear – discovered by the author in recent years.
Thanks to these images, other rooms of the Museum, hitherto undocumented, and other moments in its long life are finally restored to light, making the Museo Nazionale of Naples one of the museums certainly most portrayed in photographs during the 19th century.
The texts are readable, yet based on lengthy research, which naturally includes the illustrations. They accompany the photographs and help shed light on a period in the history of the museum which is still not sufficiently well known.
The 19th-century exhibition design of the Museo Nazionale in Naples lives again in views of the rooms, groupings of objects, display cases and images that restore the memory of exhibitions, museum interiors, decorations, furnishings: a way of preserving, cataloguing and exhibiting that was part of a museum culture at a time when the rooms were conceived as chambers of wonders, crammed with artworks.

The volume, mainly photographic, offers an important contribution to the history of European museum design, as well as that of the taste and museology of the day. It presents 40 previously unpublished photographic views – including those taken by James Walker and William Henry Goodyear – discovered by the author in recent years.

Thanks to these images, other rooms of the Museum, hitherto undocumented, and other moments in its long life are finally restored to light, making the Museo Nazionale of Naples one of the museums certainly most portrayed in photographs during the 19th century.

The texts are readable, yet based on lengthy research, which naturally includes the illustrations. They accompany the photographs and help shed light on a period in the history of the museum which is still not sufficiently well known.