Top of the World
The Castello d'Albertis, or D'Albertis Castle is a historical residence in Genoa. It was the home of sea captain Enrico Alberto d'Albertis, and was donated to the city of Genoa on his death in 1932. It currently houses the Museo delle Culture del Mondo, inaugurated in 2004. Through his adventures across land and sea between the 19th and the 20th centuries, the Captain gathered stories and artefacts and brought them back to be housed in this romantic frame inspired by ‘curiosity cabinets’ and the colonial trophies commonly collected at the time. As documented by numerous construction drawings, the castle itself, built in the neo-gothic style, encapsulates the Captain’s deep love for the sea, his curiosity for the unknown and the unexplored, his fascination for the unfamiliar worlds he visited and, underneath it all, his deeply Genoese soul.
The museum’s collections, presented in a sequence of evocative alcoves furnished according to the “revival” style of the time, are composed of ethnographic and archaeological materials gathered by the Captain across five continents; to these are added those collected by the Captain’s cousin Luigi Maria, the first to explore the Fly river in New Guinea (1872-1878).
Entering the 16th-century bastion on which the castle stands, visitors can follow a route that takes them through further extra-European collections acquired by the city in the last century, including archaeological materials from Central and South America and ethnographic materials from Canada donated by the US Catholic Mission Association following the exposition for the Columbian celebrations of 1892. All these materials, displayed with a thoughtful, contemporary exhibition design, have been revisited and contextualised through a dialogue with their source communities.
