The Ethnographic Museum of Rimini, after closing in 2000, once again opened its doors to the public, this time in the building of Villa Alvardo in the Covignano area. This is one of the main Italian museums, entirely dedicated to the ethnological and archaeological aspects of the various peoples of Africa, Oceania, pre-Columbian America and partly Asia. After its re-opening in December 2005, the museum received a new name - "The Ethnographic Collection of Rimini. Museum degli Sguardi. The initiator of this renaming was the French anthropologist Marc Auger.
Today, the museum's collections are housed in an old and architecturally very valuable building built in 1721 - a villa designed for Giovanni Antonio Alvarado, who was the personal secretary of the Spanish Emperor Charles VI in Italy. The villa has been restored on the initiative of the municipality of Rimini. Now it houses about seven thousand artifacts belonging to the museum. Previously, the villa was part of another museum - Delle Grazie, which since 1928 has been located in the Franciscan cloister. It contained objects collected by the Franciscan monks during their missions, some of which later became the property of the ethnographic museum. Particularly valuable are the exhibits relating to the history of the tribes of pre-Columbian America, which were scattered throughout the vast American continent before its conquest by the Spaniards in the 16th century. More recently, priceless artifacts from the Amazon basin have also been transferred to the museum's collection.