From the Renaissance to the Englightenment … through Antiquity: The Beginnings of the European Network of Museums

‘For specialists, this collection should become a public school’. Thus can a remark in a letter dated 8 April 1589 from the Roman scholar Fulvio Orsini to Cardinal Odoardo Farnese concerning the antiquities collection of his illustrious family be loosely but faithfully translated. His concern was that the collection be conserved so as to remain accessible to a certain public, one we would term today the scholarly community. The same Fulvio Orsini had received a letter from the cardinal Granvelle a few years before, on 22 March 1581, explaining that, if the libraries and antiquities remained in Rome, the city