The section of Etruscan and Italic antiquities includes about 15,000 works, of which almost 4,000 are exhibited in the Gregorian Etruscan Museum, which in its itinerary through twenty-two rooms also includes the sectors called Collection of Vases and Antiquarium Romanum.
Its curator, since 1996, is Dr. Maurizio Sannibale, archaeologist specialized in Etruscology.
The museum, commissioned by Pope Gregory XVI from which it takes its name, was inaugurated on February 2nd, 1837. It was one of the first public museums specifically dedicated to Etruscan antiquities after the previous eighteenth-century foundations of Tuscan milieu (Etruscan Academy of Cortona and Guarnacci Museum in Volterra).

His birth coincides with an exciting season of excavations and discoveries that in those years involved some of the most important cities of ancient Etruria, then included in the territory of the Papal States, in particular Vulci, Cerveteri and Tarquinia. The museum also brought together works already present in the Vatican since the 18th century or even the result of more ancient collecting.
Since its foundation the museum occupies the Papal Apartment of Retreat of Tor dei Venti, on the noble floor of the building begun by Michelangelo and Girolamo da Carpi in 1550 for Julius III and finished in 1564 by Pirro Ligorio under Pio IV, with its majestic scenery of the Nicchione which overlooks the courtyard of the Pigna, used by the Popes between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century.
During the twentieth century, with four renovations, the Museum almost tripled its surface, extending also over the wing erected at the time of Pius VI and over the fifteenth-century Palace of Innocent VIII, also called the Belvedere.
The works illustrate the artistic civilization and the millenary history of the Etruscan people, from the Iron Age (9th century BC) to its assimilation into the structure of the Roman state in the 1st century BC. Among these are famous masterpieces of ancient art, such as the jewellery of the Regolini-Galassi tomb, the bronze statue of the Mars of Todi, the Exekias amphora.