ABSTRACT
In 1716, Filippo Bonnani, then curator of the Museo Kircheriano at the Collegio Romano in Rome, felt compelled to correct a common misconception of visitors to his museum. Bonnani presided over the city's most significant collection of art, natural history and ethnographic material that was comparable in its scope to the great kunst- and wunderkammers of Northern Europe. Yet visitors nonetheless tended to refer to his collection as a galleria. For Bonnani, this diminished the seriousness of his project. As he put it, the term ‘galleria’ should be used to describe collections ‘made solely for their magnificence’, whereas for his institution ‘One should more properly say Museo … or, as musaeum alludes, one says a place dedicated to the muses’.1
