MUVIT – The Wine Museum

The MUVIT Wine Museum was conceived and created by Giorgio and Maria Grazia Lungarotti, it was opened to the public in 1974 and is managed by the Lungarotti Foundation. The museum is located in Torgiano, in the pars agricola of the monumental Graziani-Baglioni palace, a patrician 17th century summer residence.

The museum was conceived in support of the international wine economy, with a predominant interest aimed at the dialogue between the vine and decorative arts – ever present and organised in collections – which makes it to all effects an interdisciplinary museum. The museum’s itinerary develops along twenty rooms, it presents more than 3,000 artifacts arranged on the basis of thematic principles and exhibited according to contemporary museological criteria of great scientific rigour (see the path section).

These include archaeological finds (Cycladic jugs and Hittite vases; Greek, Etruscan and Roman ceramics; glass and bronzes), tools and technical equipment for viticulture and winemaking, ceramic wine containers of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque ages as well as contemporary, engravings and drawings from the 15th to the 20th century, scholarly editions on viticulture and oenology texts, goldsmith art, textiles and other testimonies of decorative arts, all of which contribute to document the importance of wine in the collective imagination of the peoples who have lived, over the millennia, around the Mediterranean and in continental Europe.

Starting from the ancient world, vines and wine, supporting elements in the agricultural economy of those peoples, have alternated purely economic and religious meanings with profane ones. From the most remote times until today, their recurring presence in the arts and crafts is constant in form and decor. The individual collections  on display at the museum propose the wine and the Dionysian theme as threads; following these allows decyphering the historical events of which the single objects become the expression.