Catalan Museum of Archaeology

This guide to the Catalan Museum of Archaeology in Barcelona opens on the pavilion's brief run as a new museum in November 1935, just months before the Spanish Civil War reached Barcelona in 1936. It follows the scramble that came next: staff emptying display cases, shipping crates to neutral Geneva, and burying the museum's own Roman floor mosaics, including one showing the Three Graces, under sandbags and brick to keep them from the bombing falling on the port below. The collection itself is older still, started in 1840 by the historian Prosper de Bofarull in a ruined convent.