Museo Omero: free, and made to be touched

The Museo Tattile Statale Omero in Ancona charges nothing for entry in 2026, and it is built to be gone through by hand: the sculpture on show is meant to be touched.

Free, with one €5 exception

The museum costs nothing in 2026. The Design Collection is the one paid part, at €5, and it is free on the first Sunday of the month.

That pricing is deliberate rather than a promotion. A tactile museum takes longer per visitor and works badly with timed slots, and dropping the ticket removes the queue that would otherwise defeat the format. Prices on this page are in euros.

Afternoon on weekdays, all day on Sunday

Hours run 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm Tuesday to Saturday and 10:00 am to 6:00 pm on Sundays and public holidays (15:00 to 18:00 and 10:00 to 18:00 on Italian signs). From April 1 to October 31 the Friday opening moves forward to 2:00 pm.

Three hours on a weekday afternoon is a short window, and it is the single most common way to miss this place. If you are on a ferry schedule, the Sunday timetable is the one that fits.

What handling actually changes

One instruction governs the whole layout: put your hands on the work. Casts and originals alike are chosen and mounted so a form can be read by the palms, at reachable height and without a rope in front.

For a blind visitor that is access. For a sighted one it is a different sense doing the work, and it tends to catch out people who expect a specialist collection and find a general one: the pieces are the standard canon, met a different way.

The building is a quarantine station

The museum sits inside the Mole Vanvitelliana, the pentagonal lazaretto designed by Luigi Vanvitelli on an artificial island in the port, first stone July 26, 1733³ and finished in 1743³. The address is Banchina Giovanni da Chio 28.

Ramps run through every hall and the Comune lists the whole building as accessible to people with disabilities. Details of the venue and its event calendar are at the Mole Vanvitelliana.

Two monuments above the same water

The Arch of Trajan, dated 100² or 116² AD, is not a city gate: it is an honorary single-arch monument built on the mole itself, dedicated to Trajan together with his wife Plotina and his sister Marciana for enlarging and securing the port.

It is cut from large blocks of Hymettus marble brought from Greece, on a podium of Conero stone, with two Corinthian columns carrying the attic. It was restored in 2000, and its height is not stated in the city's record, so this page does not give one. Imported Attic marble is the detail that shows what rank the emperor gave this harbour.

Up the hill, the cathedral of San Ciriaco stands on the Colle Guasco, the highest point of the old town, on an uncommon Greek cross plan, over the remains of a Hellenistic temple of Aphrodite. The story of the museum itself is at the museum you touch with your hands, and the city at Ancona.

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