Museo Missionario di Propaganda Fide displays some of the paintings, brought back by priests, from around the world
In a dimly lit space, black and white images slowly materialise and fade. On one wall, a priest nails a cross to a tree deep in the Colombian jungle. On another, there are photos of old Japan, including an intriguing one that shows Christian monks bowing to a figure in a mask.
The photographs, from the archives of the Roman Catholic missionary news agency Fides, are among the attractions at Rome's newest museum.
The Museo Missionario di Propaganda Fide is located in a narrow street near the Spanish Steps on the first floor of the stately palazzo which, since 1627, has been the headquarters of Catholicism's global missionary operations.
The department, known as the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, was for centuries referred to as Propaganda Fide (propagation of the faith).
When it was set up in 1622, pope Gregory XV told the priests who were to travel to distant lands that they were "not to reject anything good, pure or holy in the cultures and religions of the peoples they encountered".
The museum is, in part, a tribute to those who followed his instruction.
There are paintings brought back by a Spanish prelate, Carlos Cuarter�n, who explored the Philippines in the mid-19th century.
There are others of Japanese life in the 1930s, including one, pictured left, showing a naughty schoolgirl tying something into her classmate's pigtails.
And there is a monument of elephants' tusks to the 22 Ugandan martyrs who died for their faith in the 1880s.
The collection is nothing like as big as that of the Missionary Ethnological Museum in the Vatican, which has some 100,000 exhibits but is temporarily closed. The task of assembling the new collection was given to Francesco Buranelli, the secretary of the pontifical commission for church heritage.
While exploring the Congregation's archives and storerooms, he found a previously unknown painting by the 19th-century artist, Antonio Canova.
"We removed it from its frame and discovered he had signed it in a part of the canvas that was below the frame," said Buranelli.
The new collection also includes paintings commissioned by, or donated to the Congregation, including works by the baroque masters Salvator Rosa and Jan Frans van Bloemen. And, as a result of the opening of the new museum, a depiction of the Pentecost by the Rococo painter, Corrado Giaquinto, is being shown for the first time.
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