Museo Civico della Gente senza Storia

The Museo Civico della Gente senza Storia (Civic Museum of People without History) - also abbreviated as MuGesS - is located inside the Virginian Monastery of Altavilla Irpina, the current town hall. 

Inaugurated in 1997, the MuGesS houses numerous ancient artefacts that allow us to retrace, from prehistory to modern times, the millennial history of the important centre of the Sabato Valley, located on the border between the territories of the provinces of Avellino and Benevento. The Museum's exhibition is divided into four rooms, respectively dedicated to archaeology, 19th-century popular costume, the Middle Ages and the liturgical vestments worn by the clergy of Altavilla between the 16th and 18th centuries. Since 2017, the Scientific Direction of the Museum has been entrusted to the cultural enterprise Kinetès Srl, a spin-off of the University of Sannio in Benevento.

Among the most original collections of the MuGesS, the one that stands out is that of the clothes found in the cemetery of the poor, the so-called "Holy Land", located in the crypt of the Collegiate Church of San Pellegrino, which belonged to adults and children who died between 1790 and 1840 and underwent extraordinary restoration work. The uniqueness of the exhibition is in fact made up of a series of costumes of ordinary people without a history (peasants, artisans, children, soldiers) recovered from the mummified graves of the crypt-ossuary and dated to the beginning of the 19th century.

The precious historical repertoire housed in the Civic Museum of People without History is unique not only in the province of Avellino but in the whole of southern Italy.