Museo
Ranuccio Bianchi Banditelli

Housed in the fourteenth-century Palazzo del Podestà which is located in the central Piazza del Duomo, the “Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli” Archaeological Museum occupies all three floors of the building. The first nucleus, consisting of the civic Antiquarium, was inaugurated in 1976 to house the finds that the Municipality had purchased from Countess Marinella Terrosi Vagnoli. She was the owner of one of the most important archaeological collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on the initiative of Count Giulio Terrosi who undertook the excavation of the Casone necropolis in Monteriggioni. Precisely during these searches, in 1893 the tomb of the Calisna Sepu was found, one of the most important hypogea of northern Etruria, in use between the end of the fourth and the beginning of the first century BC. and which still today represent the main complex of the exhibition collection. One of the first scholars who dealt with the Terrosi Collection and the Calisna Sepu tomb was the Sienese Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli. He devoted himself to a long and profound study of the Etruscan Valdelsa and for this commitment the museum was named after him. From the 1970s onwards, the Museum, thanks also to the action of the Colligiano Archaeological Group, has been enriched with numerous tomb complexes, finds and reconstructions that place it today as one of the most important in the province of Siena.