Exhibiting the Etruscans Today: Rethinking Ways of Bridging the Past and the Present

In 2026, three exhibitions on the Etruscans went on display in California’s Bay Area, providing the impetus for a workshop that brought together professionals working on strategies to make the Etruscans’ heritage engaging and relevant to diverse 21st-century museumgoers. These proceedings include case studies about institutions and exhibitions in Italy, Denmark, and the United States. The first contributions outline the strategies being employed to modernize the Etruscan displays and didactic materials at Italian national and regional museums, as well as efforts aimed at increasing accessibility and understanding through multimedia supports. Next is an overview of the collecting policies and curatorial trends at the four largest Danish museums with Classical antiquities, each of which continues to shape how the Etruscans are understood outside Italy. The final set of essays considers the exhibitions in the Bay Area as well as two others, one in New York City that highlighted new material from Poggio Colla and Norchia and the second at a regional museum in the southeast. The authors address topics ranging from curatorial rationales and design decisions to the use of 3D replicas and AI and how collections research can provide critical hands-on experiences for art history and museum studies students.