Historic Mantuan residence of the Counts of Arco, donated to the city of Mantua in 1973 by Countess Joan of Arc, the last heir of the noble family of Trentino origin, who wanted to dedicate her home to a museum, thus allowing visitors to admire an extraordinarily rich cultural heritage.
Palazzo d'Arco preserves the family's rich collections: everyday objects that bear witness to noble customs, and works commissioned or purchased for their aesthetic, historical, and communicative value. These collections coexist with the furnishings in the museum's rooms and are an integral part of the family history of the Counts of Arco Chieppio Ardizzoni.
The collections housed in the Palace are highly diverse, ranging from works of art and ceramics to ancient weapons, from books to furniture and musical instruments. Among these, the natural history collection of Count Luigi d'Arco is noteworthy. The natural history collections are housed on the piano nobile of the fifteenth-century building at the end of the garden. As was often the case with nineteenth-century scholars, Luigi d'Arco also focused on the entire field of natural history, exploring many areas of nature: botany, malacology, geology, paleontology, osteology, ornithology, and entomology. It is difficult to clearly separate his individual research from all his other studies.