The Civic Museum, now made up of the Civic Archaeological Ethnological Museum and the Civic Art Museum , was born in 1871 as a unitary museum and since 1886 has been housed in the Palazzo dei Musei.

Its founder and first director Carlo Boni created a museum characterized by an apparent heterogeneity, the result, however, of an organic design designed to "welcome and preserve everything that could interest the entire population". Subsequent directors, Arsenio Crespellani and Luigi Alberto Gandini, continued the work with important extensions of the heritage.

The nineteenth-century origin has been enhanced in the current exhibition aspect of the museum, dating back to 1991, which keeps the nineteenth-century furnishings substantially intact and recovers a museological testimony of absolute importance in the Italian and European panorama.

The birth of the city museum was promoted and shared by an enlightened bourgeoisie who, in the years immediately following the unification of the country, wanted to prevent the dispersion of the local archaeological, historical and artistic heritage and who deposited in the museum, through bequests and donations, the memory of himself and of his time.

Through relationships with the world of major international exhibitions and the nascent European museums of decorative arts, the museum developed its didactic vocation over the following decades by creating repertoires of techniques, forms and models of the most varied types of materials.