Ateneo Archive and History Trail in Siena

The Ateneo Archive and historic trail forms part of the University of Siena's museum system (SIMUS), and is located inside the illustrious palazzo del Rettorato, the heart of the university.

Setting foot inside it today, you can make a voyage through the university's history, from the Middle Ages right up to the modern day. This journey takes you through a range of documentation and relics, displayed in the appropriate cabinets or held in the historic archive: together, the trail works its way through six rooms.

The historical archive contains all documents produced or acquired by the Ateneo between 1560 and 1955, which allows us to appreciate how the university developed over these four centuries, and enables us to reconstruct the biographies of the standout names who taught and studied here. The archive too forms part of this "historical trail", whose items and documents represent the most important episodes in the life of the university.