Rome's National Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions

The Museum of National Arts and Popular Traditions is located in the EUR neighborhood of Rome.  It’s also a hop, skip and a jump from where the funeral scene was shot in the last Bond movie, “SPECTRE” (where both Daniel Craig and Monica Bellucci show up for the funeral of Bellucci’s bad-guy husband). 


The museum contains an interesting collection of popular Italian art and tradition from the 19^th and 20^th centuries.   Up to 30,000 different objects can be found there.   There's a bit of everything on display at the museum.


The construction of the unique  building was begun during the Italian fascist period in 1938 and was completed four years later. The museum is also tied to the 1942 “Universal Exhibit of Rome” which under Mussolini never got off the ground because of events tied to WWII. 


The museum holds a variety of different objects, such as a Sicilian cart, a Venetian Gondola and also a wide array of religious artifacts plus some 12,000 books too.   There’s talk of closing the museum, indeed a real pity as it seems to attract in the summertime tourists from as far way as France (admittedly, the EUR area of Rome is NOT very popular with the average tourist as it’s a few miles from the city center). 

(The famous "Sicilian carts")

(The building itself is rather impressive)