Museo Artistico Industriale (M.A.I.)

The Industrial Artistic Museum was founded in Rome in 1874 with the purpose of collecting handmade articles (glasses, ceramics, sculptures, painted fabrics, plaster casts, and photographs) from the ancient times to the seventeenth century, and at the same time of acting as a training school for qualified craftsmen, thus combining the theoretic and the experimental phases. When the Museum was closed, the collections were dismantled and moved to the storerooms of various Roman museums. Palazzo Barberini houses the main core with about 2,000 objects, in particular ceramics, glasses, fabrics, and wooden sculptures. Instead the archeological findings are kept in the Capitoline Museums, while the rest of the collection is disseminated among the Museum of Palazzo Venezia, Palazzo Braschi, the Museum of Castel Sant'Angelo, the Museum of the Roman Civilization and the State Institute of Art in Via Odescalchi.