Museo Nazionale degli Strumenti Musicali

The National Museum of Musical Instruments was inaugurated in 1974 and is located in the former Barracks "Principe di Piemonte" near the Basilica of Holy Cross in Jerusalem. The collection developed around the collection donated to the State in 1950 by the tenor Evan Gorga (1865-1957), with the successive addition of instruments from the Museum of Piazza Venezia and the Museum of History of the Popular Traditions. About 840 of the 3,000 pieces of the collection are exhibited. The history of music from the first Greek and Roman ancient wind and percussion instruments up to the ones used today is reconstructed in 18 halls. Instruments of popular and cultured, religious and military music, instruments of non-European musica ltradition coming from Africa, Oceania, and America are exhibited. Pieces of particular interest are the Barberini harp of the seventeenth century, the Italian vertical harpsichord, and the pianoforte built in 1722 by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1732), universally acknowledged as the inventor of this type of instrument.