Museum of Plaster Figurines, Collectible card museum in Modena, Italy

The Museo della figurina opened on 15 December 2006 in a large hall of Palazzo Santa Margherita in Modena. Six cabinets, each shaped like a giant browsable album, trace the history of collectible cards through 2,500 original prints and objects drawn from a collection of about 500,000 pieces.

The museum opened on 15 December 2006 in Palazzo Santa Margherita, Modena. Its core is the collection of Giuseppe Panini, founder of the Panini group, who gathered small prints from the start of his business; in 1986 it became a museum inside the company itself. In 1992 he donated the roughly 500,000-piece collection to the city, and cataloguing, acquisitions and thematic exhibitions followed.

The museum's name comes from the figurina, the small printed picture that Panini turned into a modern collectible. The permanent display is organised as six cabinets, each a giant album to leaf through, covering themes from chromolithography to the Liebig series and post-war football albums. A workshop for school activities and a specialised library also operate on site.

The permanent display fills one large hall with six cabinets, each built as a giant browsable album covering a stage of card history, holding 2,500 original pieces. A workshop for educational activities and a specialised library are also inside. Temporary exhibitions change theme, so check what is on before travelling.

The collection includes 80,000 letter seals, alongside English cigarette cards, cigar bands, matchboxes, hotel menus and labels, and barber-shop calendars. These small colour prints were gathered by Giuseppe Panini to document the whole world of printed ephemera, not only sports cards.