Andrea Bruno

The museum at Maa-Palaeokastro hardly shows above ground: nothing rises over the peninsula except a copper-covered cupola. Its architect was Andrea Bruno, a professor at the University of Turin, who drew the plans and supervised the whole work together with Glafkos Papadouris of the Department of Antiquities¹. The Leventis Foundation had accepted the Department's proposal to build a small museum there for the results of the 1979 to 1986 excavations and for didactic material on the Aegean presence in Cyprus¹.

Bruno's own comment, printed with the description, says the aim was to leave the skyline of the unspoilt peninsula unaltered. The museum is a circular hall 12 m across, sunk into the ground and reached by a ramp. Light comes through a triangular window and a large sloping mirror that carries sky and sunlight down into the room. Bruno describes the arrangement as "a sort of recognition of the work of the archaeologist"¹.

The museum is listed as opened in 1996, as the Museum of the Mycenaean Colonization of Cyprus, an underground building that shows copies rather than original finds². The same year Bruno published The archaeological museum of Maa in Cyprus in Milan².

Bruno was born in Turin on 11 January 1931 and died there on 6 July 2025⁴.