At the beginning of 1794, Luigi Lanzi travelled to Turin to visit collections he had not yet seen: the Museum of Antiquities and major private collections of antiquities, specifically those of Abbot Carlo Antonio Pullini and Commendator Modesto Genevosio. The notes he wrote on this occasion were included as an appendix to his travel journal on the Veneto region and, for this reason, have generally escaped scholarly attention regarding Piedmont. In describing the objects on display at the museum – which he is often the first among 18th-century travellers to mention – Lanzi shows particular (and unusual) interest in locally excavated artifacts or, more broadly, in material that at the time had no known parallels elsewhere. This is the case with objects of silverware from the 2nd–3rd century AD, originating from Roman Gaul, which Lanzi considers “the most singular genre in this Museum after the table [that is, the famous Mensa Isiaca]”.
His detailed description of the Pullini collection allows us to recover the existence of a votive marble relief from the Danubian region, previously undocumented, while his account of Genevosio's gem collection (dactyliotheca) remains to this day the most valuable source for reconstructing that collection. Pullini's text, published in 1788 by Donata
Levi, is supplemented in this study with corresponding archaeological notes.