The museum depots of Palazzo San Sebastiano store diverse materials in anticipation of their future exhibition to the public.
The Rirsorgimento collection consists of more than a thousand items including: uniforms, equipment, accessories, weapons, ammunition, friezes, badges, coins, medals, decorations, memorabilia, prints, paintings, drawings and sculptures once exhibited at the Museo del Risorgimento opened in 1903. Artefacts relating to the history of the Resistance were added, in 1975, to an initial nucleus of objects. At the end of the 1980s, the Museum was closed to the public in order to reorganise the exhibition, but the work was blocked by the revocation of the provincial-owned premises that housed the Museum.
The Sammartini collection consists of rare specimens of views and maps of the city, maps of the Duchy of Mantua, portraits, historical prints dating back to the French period and 19th-century Mantua, topographical maps and extremely rare 18th-century travel postcards.
All the material is currently catalogued, inventoried and available for consultation at the Civic Museums Documentation Centre, and can be viewed and accessed by appointment.
The collection of plaster casts collected between 1769 and 1776 by the painter Giuseppe Bottani, director of the Academy of Painting Sculpture and Architecture in Mantua was used for life drawing by students until 1862. It currently consists of a total of 231 pieces. A magnificent plaster cast, an 18th-century copy of the Apollo of Belvedere, was restored in 2020 and displayed in the barrel vault of the entrance hall of the MACA Museum.
