Museo Archeologico di Vereto - MAV

The Archaeological Museum of Vereto (MAV) is set up in the halls of Palazzo Romano, a noble building that was the residence of Liborio Romano, a Salento jurist and politician, deputy in the first Italian Parliament from 1861 to 1865. The ancient settlement of Vereto, a Messapian settlement and later a Roman municipium, stood on the elongated limestone relief, locally called "serra", which with its 120 meters high dominates the landscape for a long stretch. The first room of the Museum opens to the story of the long settlement history of Vereto with the exhibition of some inscriptions in the Messapian language that report the first signs of writing, testimony of the vast network of exchanges of ideas, knowledge and skills that involved the land of the Messapians in the most significant centuries of its culture. The objects of daily use, testimonies of the material culture of the ancient communities, are exhibited in Room 2, combining the practices of the past with contemporary uses. The large wall map then leads to the discovery of inhabited areas, places of worship and contexts of the finds of archaeological materials. The theme of the story in the third room is end-of-life rituals. The deposition of the deceased belonging to the Messapian elites and to the citizens of the Roman city are evidence of the social and economic power of the ancient communities: the exposed materials, coming from the Veretine necropolis, talk about ceremonies and funerary uses.