Part of the Florence University museums, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology was founded in 1869 by anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza with the goal of collecting testimonies of human diversity: 18 halls display prestigious and rich ethnographic collections that were extremely important to the documentation of international cultures in the 19th century. Any sort of objects that described the habit and customs of various populations were collected: clothing and accessories, ornaments and jewellery, architectural elements, idols and amulets, attack, defence and hunting weapons. And also tools for agricultural production, fishing and home life, furnishing objects of homes, music instruments, liturgical objects of various cults, books, paintings and manuscripts. The oldest parts of this collection date back to the 16th and 17th century and come from the Medici thanks to the family’s interest in collecting refined objects in particular from the New World. South American testimonies are spectacular, with manufacts of the Tupinanba population, very rare objects of the Ainu culture, from the island of Hokkaido in Japan. And also testimonies from North America, Lapland, Siberia, the Indonesian archipelago, the Horn of Africa and South Africa. The museum also has an important photographic archive with a collection of thousands of photos taken between the late 19th century and early 20th century, precious testimony of the ethnographic collections.