National Museum of Oriental Art


Rome's National Museum of Oriental Art "Giuseppe Tucci" is a museum in Rome, Italy, that was dedicated to the arts of the Orient, from the Middle East to Japan. The museum was located in Via Merulana 248 in the Rione Esquilino. It was founded in 1957 and closed in 2017, when its collections were transferred to the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in the city's southern EUR suburb
The museum was founded upon a collection of art objects from Nepal, Tibet and Ladakh that Giuseppe Tucci had acquired during his travels in 1928-1948. Later acquisitions included a notable group of artifacts from the Gandhara area, that had been acquired from the archaeological missions of the Italian Institute for Middle and Far East to the Buddhist and protohistoric sites of Swat, namely the Butkara Stupa, Barikot, Panr, and Aligrama among others. Other holdings include items from the Palace of Mas'ud III and the Buddhist shrine of Tape Sardar at Ghazni, Afghanistan, and the prehistoric city of Shahr-e Sokhteh, in eastern Iran.