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This room tries to recreate the atmosphere of the De Minicis house museum. Here ancient objects
were placed side by side with books and historical documents. There is no a descriptive catalogue
of the collection so its reconstruction is very difficult. However, there are descriptions of the contemporaries who visited the museum. They were struck by the variety of objects preserved in it.
The collection, although private, had to be open to the public, as evidenced in the main guide of
the city published in 1864 by the lawyer and historian Vincenzo Curi, where there is a mention of it.
Here a copy is exhibited. Another important evidence, similarly exhibited in copy, is the one of Count Serafino D’Altemps, a friend of the two brothers, who left the most extensive and complete description of the museum. His note dates back to 1842, the moment of maximum splendor of the collection. Ancient inscriptions and sculptures were exhibited together with paintings and other modern objects of historic-artistic interest.
Even Theodor Mommsen, father of the epigraphy, and universally considered as the greatest classicist of the 19 th century, while recognizing the limits of the two brothers’ capacity for historical analysis, visited their museum and described it as very rich in his Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL). The latter is a multi-volume work that collects all the Latin inscriptions of the Roman Empire, geographically arranged; in particular the volume IX is dedicated to the inscriptions of the Adriatic side of central-southern Italy including the Piceno area.