The material, arranged chronologically, illustrates human life in northern Italy from the Neolithic to the Roman colonisation in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC.
The visual itinerary opens with the Neolithic Lagozza culture (Besnate, Varese), of the 4th millennium BC.
The museum route illustrates the Bronze Age (c. 2200-1200) through finds from the timber settlements and terramare of eastern Lombardy and through burials discovered in western Lombardy and attributed to cultures other than the Terramare culture (the Scamozzina and Canegrate cultures).
The finds shed light on the main aspects of the period, such as farming, animal husbandry, and the working of horn, bone and metals.
The Early Iron Age section is devoted to the Golasecca culture (Varese), which shows the transition from scarcely differentiated communities, which left us simple and similar graves, to the period when an aristocratic class emerged, placing grave goods of extraordinary richness in its burials. This is the case of the “First Warrior’s Tomb” of Sesto Calende (second half of the 7th century BC).
The Celtic settlements in Italy (4th century BC) are documented by the grave goods of warriors and by traditional women’s ornaments. From the 2nd century BC relations between Celts and Romans intensified: valuable Roman objects (bronze vessels, strigils and black-gloss tableware) appear in Celtic graves and become increasingly frequent, documenting the gradual integration of the local peoples into the Roman world.