The predominantly didactic purpose of the collection, initially fueled by a prudent purchasing policy and conceived as a field of practical exercises in archeology and classical art history, gives the reason for its non-specialist character, but articulated on a great variety of materials, distributed over a very extended chronological span (from the 2nd millennium BC to late antiquity).

[1] The series of marble sculptures largely dates back to Aldini's acquisitions, including the most valuable piece in the collection, the splendid female head, a Roman replica of the Aphrodite Sosadra of Calamis.

Interesting for the history of the circulation of forgeries in the antiquarian trade is the presence of some pieces of modern execution, including an eighteenth-century copy of a portrait in the National Museum of Naples, long considered to be a Hellenistic original.

From the purchase in 1831 of the collection of the Milanese sculptor Giovanni Battista Comolli come a series of painted vases of Apulian production (4th century BC) and a small group of black-glazed Ware pottery attributable to Etruscan and southern Italic factories.

Again through donations, the collection of Marquis Stefano Bernardo Majnoni, a native of Intignano and probably the most active and cultured collector of the first half of the nineteenth century in Lombardy, also enriched the museum's assets.

[17] The collection consists of a group of Apulian vases, probably of funerary origin, which belonged to the Milanese sculptor Giovanni Battista Comolli and acquired in 1831 and two bell hydriai, which arrived between 1929 and 1948 thanks to Carlo Albizzati, professor of Archeology in the University of Pavia.

The civilization of peninsular Italy before the Roman conquest is witnessed in the Museum as well as by ceramics, by a precious Umbrian bronze statuette of a warrior (mid-5th century BC) and by the extraordinary series of votive terracottas, donated by Pope Pius XI in 1934 to the University of Pavia, in the form of heads and anatomical parts, dating back to the Hellenistic age, from Caere, today's Cerveteri.

[19] Also belonging to the Archaeological Museum is the Gipsoteca (about thirty pieces) which preserves plaster casts on a 1:1 scale of famous works of classical sculpture, from the archaic age to Hellenism, such as the Discobolus, Apollo Sauroktònos, the Nike of Samothrace or the Aphrodite of Milo.