The Permanent Gallery: Mediterranean Connections
Various · Permanent display since 2013, renewed in 2017
The ground floor gallery is where the museum explains what it is for. Instead of a march through centuries, the display takes the great port cities of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Mediterranean, Istanbul, Venice, Genoa, Algiers, Seville and Lisbon, and shows how they were bound together by trade, war, religion and ideas, then asks how the same connections work in the cities of today, from Marseille to Cairo. Ship models, maps, portraits, ceramics, coins and old films sit in glass cases under the dim light of the lattice, and the sea is visible through the wall beside you.
Look for the objects that carry the argument: models of the ships that linked the ports, ceramics and textiles that travelled between Ottoman and Christian shores, coins and navigation instruments, and printed views of harbours crowded with masts. A large section follows the historian Fernand Braudel, who wrote the classic book about this sea in the nineteen forties, and the museum treats him as a kind of patron saint. The second half of the gallery turns to the present, with photographs, video and objects from contemporary Marseille and its partner cities across the water.
The display has been renewed more than once since the museum opened in twenty thirteen, and its themes shift, so expect variations from what is described here. What stays constant is the idea: that the Mediterranean is not a border between Europe and elsewhere but a shared space, and that Marseille, with families from every shore, is its natural capital. The gallery is included in the general ticket and takes about an hour.
Did You Know? The museum inherited about two hundred and fifty thousand objects from the old museum of popular arts and traditions in Paris, most of them everyday things such as tools, toys and costumes rather than treasures.
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