Galata Maritime Museum

Genova is one of the world’s historic maritime cities. The purpose-built maritime museum in the Galata docks area opened when Genova was European Capital of Culturein 2004. It has 200,000 visitors a year. The building houses several full-size replica vessels – a seventeenth-century Genoese galley, the brigantine Anna and a timber ship under construction in an eighteenth-century shipbuilding yard. The museum has 4,300 objects to use in thematic displays, for example about the Roman galleys once built here, the shipowners of Genova and migration to and from Italy by sea. The exhibition about emigration tells the story of the transatlantic liners to New York with a simulator showing a journey from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Ellis Island immigration centre. Visitors can also experience the conditions on a real submarine, the Nazario Sauro, which floats in front of the museum.