The Museum of the Biellese Territory was inaugurated in the current seat of the former Convent of
San Sebastiano, in 2001. The museum houses the civic collections which, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, have been enriched to the present day, through finds in the area, donations, bequests and deposits.
The heterogeneous museum heritage has made it possible to articulate the visit route through the Paleontological, Archaeological, Egyptian, Pre-Columbian and Historical-artistic sections.
 
The Paleontological section illustrates how up to 2 and a half million years ago the sea occupied large areas of the Biella area by knotting the "Moving on water" section whose undisputed protagonist is the monossyl pirogue of Roman age, found in the Bertignano lake .
In the large hall that houses the archaeological collections, a chronological path, divided into several rooms, develops over time from Prehistory to the Middle Ages: from protohistoric finds from Viverone and Burcina, to the history of the exploitation of the Auris of Bessa by the Celts first and then the Romans, up to the Roman necropolises of Biella and Cerrione, with its lepontium gravestones, to reach the Medieval section in which we find the finds on Mount Rubello that tell of Fra 'Dolcino.
To complete the archaeological heritage, two important sections, the result of donations from illustrious Biellese: the Egyptian room, closely linked to two famous Biellese citizens, Corradino Sella and Ernesto Schiaparelli, which preserves and enhances, among others, the Taaset mummy and its magnificent wooden sarcophagus, and the hall of Pre-Columbian Cultures, the result of the donation of the entrepreneur from Biella Ugo Canepa. The finds belong to the cultures that flourished in Mesoamerica, in the Inetrmedia area (Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua) and in the Andean territories before the arrival of the Conquistadores and allow you to learn about the knowledge and lifestyle habits of ethnic cultural groups allocated in the territories that currently they go from Mexico to Peru, from the first millennium BC to hispanic conquest.
 
The visit continues with the historical-artistic collections. In the large hall on the first floor, starting from the pictorial evidence of the XII century, it is possible to follow the evolution of the figurative culture and of the local collecting taste with sixteenth-century works from the most illustrious Vercelli shops and Caravaggesque paintings or from the eighteenth-century Venetian school.
The collections of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the result of private donations, allow you to present the Piedmontese landscape painting with remarkable paintings by Antonio Fontanesi, Marco Calderini, Giovanni Giani and Giovanni Piumati and to insert the production of Lorenzo Delleani in a wider artistic and cultural context, native of Pollone and among the greatest exponents of landscape painting of his time.
The Museum preserves the divisionist masterpiece "Reflections of a hungry" by Emilio Longoni, which opens the path dedicated to Biella's collecting from which works by Carlo Carrà, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo come up to the major exponents of the historical Avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century, as Renè Magritte, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Joan Mirò and compatriots Giacomo Balla and Lucio Fontana.