Abstract

The Nemi Museum of Roman Ships is a unique piece of architecture, not only because of its troubled history, but above all because of its extraordinary importance from a typological point of view, being in fact the first archaeological cover built in Italy. Vittorio Morpurgo had realised that the only way to safeguard the Ships was to build a ‘tailor-made’ architectural structure, and in 1936 he started the construction of the large Hangars structure in reinforced concrete. If from a constructional point of view the structure is based on the reinforced concrete hall structures developed in the 1920s, from a conceptual point of view it takes its cue from the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, the first museum to house large architectural structures from the past.