The Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions was built around the core of the collection of Lamberto Doria. It was enriched by objects that arrived from throughout Italy to Rome in 1911 for the Italian Ethnographic Exhibition within the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Union of Italy. 

Since 1956 it is located in the building designed in 1938 by the architects Castellazzi, Morresi, and Vitellozzi. The structure presents rich mosaic decorations, both external, realized by Enrico Prampolini, and internal, realized by the artists Amato, Barillà, Barrera, Bertoletti, Cascella, Cavalli, Colao, Guberti, and Varagnolo. 

The Museum keeps over 100 thousand testimonies of the traditional Italian culture from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. 

The collection consists of about 700 regional costumes; over 4 thousand traditional gold jewels and amulets, more than 6 thousand wooden handmade articles between work-tools and folk handicrafts; about 5 thousand ceramics, mainly Sicilian; paintings on glass from Alto Adige and Sicily; peddler signs and equipment; a rich collection of carved horns and pumpkins from various sources, several Italian cribs, including an eighteenth century Neapolitan crib; over 9 thousand prints and drawings. 

So it is a large collection, grouped by thematic sectors: the house, attire, work, transportation, the cycle of the human life and of the year with ceremonies, the religiousness of people, the feasts in the squares, and the traditional musical instruments. The collection includes also a rich audio-visual, photographic, and sound documentation.