The Musei Civici of Reggio Emilia are housed in the Palazzo dei Musei, a stately eighteenth-century building on Piazza Martiri del 7 Luglio just north of the opera house. The complex brings together several collections under one roof: natural history, archaeology, and the city's collections of medieval and early modern art. The archaeological section is particularly strong, covering the Roman and pre-Roman periods of the Po Valley.
The Galleria Parmeggiani, located nearby in a neo-Gothic palace on Corso Cairoli, is technically a separate collection but managed alongside the civic museums. It holds a rich and eccentric assemblage of Flemish and Spanish paintings, arms and armour, furniture, and decorative arts collected by a Spanish anarchist and dealer named Luigi Parmeggiani in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is one of those wonderfully idiosyncratic Italian museums that larger cities would never produce.