Galata Sea Museum, Genoa, Liguria, Italy, Europe

The Galata Museo del mare of Genoa is the museum dedicated to this largest genre of the Mediterranean area and also one of the most modern in Italy. Galata is a historic district of Istanbul, and, until the fifteenth century, home to one of the most important Genoese communities in the Mediterranean. So at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Municipality of Genoa built a district of commercial docks, the oldest of these was given the name of the ancient colony. In the nineteenth century, "the Galata" already had a history of almost three centuries: in its lower part, in fact, the galleys of the Republic of Genoa were built and the building was part of the Arsenale, the most important military and maritime complex of the city. In the twentieth century, "Galata" lost its commercial function and was abandoned. At the end of the 90s, the Municipality decided to establish here the headquarters of the future maritime museum of Genoa. Inaugurated in 2004, the museum is housed in the Galata Palace, whose renovation was designed by the Spanish architect Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra. The museum houses, in addition to a full-scale reproduction of a Genoese galley, several interactive rooms in which to understand what it meant, at different times, to go by sea. One of these is the "La Merica" ​​exhibition that shows the journey of our ancestors to America. There are numerous rooms dedicated to maritime trade and sea going at the time of the maritime republic of Genoa. The museum also exhibits a section dedicated to transatlantic charts with nautical charts and a storm simulation off Cape Horn. Galata - Museo del mare also offers an exhibition hall, bookshop, café with terrace. It is home to activities with schools, also favored by the proximity of the museum complex with the Genova Principe station and the proximity of the "Darsena" underground station. In 1978, off the Falkland Islands in the South of the Atlantic Ocean, Ambrogio Fogar's boat was probably struck by an Orca or an anomalous wave and soon sinked. Ambrogio and his traveling companion Mauro Mancini manage to save themselves on a raft where they were saved 74 days later, but unfortunately Mancini did not survive. In 2010, 32 years later, the Fogar family decided to donate the raft to the Galata - Maritime Museum of Genoa; the donation was made directly by his daughter Francesca Fogar.