Museo dello sbarco di Anzio, Anzio

Well-intentioned museum that doesn’t meet the mark except for diehards. That said, hopefully tourists, especially Americans, will make a brief stop by cultural obligation. There’s no story here, no narrative, no big text explaining exhibits and how they connect. What was the Anzio landing about? You’d be hard-pressed to learn the answer here, unfortunately. If you already know, you have historical scaffolding around which to wrap these artifacts. If you didn’t walk in knowing, it’s just a bunch of stuff with little to no context. Artifacts are mostly without captions; where there are captions, they’re only in Italian. Presentations appear not to have been updated in many years. That doesn’t necessarily make them poor exhibits, but here given the lack of curation, it suggests there’s been little effort toward improvement in a long time. Volunteer, shoestring operations try really hard. I'm certain the people who run this museum do their best. I’m surprised and saddened Italy can’t seem to get a museum together to properly tell this story, in whole or at least a microcosm. I’d hoped Anzio might be more than “here’s a bunch of stuff.” It wasn’t. The good news is museum has a core collection of artifacts, and that’s the hard part. If they offer a multilingual narrative & captions, that’d go a long way toward making this museum accessible to mainstream visitors. The big United States flag is hung backward. Hopefully it will be get adjusted properly. VISITED: 31 October 2021; no entry charge; donations accepted.

Charming and relevant museum founded by an enthusiastic man who is passionate about growing and promoting the collection. If you can help them expand, they need benefactors. Few people realize that the allied invasion at Anzio was a fiasco that cost many lives unnecessarily.