Considering the recent developments in museum and exhibition design, adapting them to the contemporary digital age, museum professionals have increasingly employed multimedia in their exhibitions. The creative use of technology in a historical and archaeological exhibition allows museums to place the artifacts in their context, to explain complex ideas, to reconstruct historical events, to increase interaction and to simulate and stimulate new experiences.
A museum unique in Italy, which makes technology the one and only communication mean with the subordinate function of being a place of knowledge, learning, and entertainment, is the MAV (Museo Archeologico Virtuale) in Herculaneum.
In a different manner, a good example of well-balanced design of multimedia tools inserted within the exhibition is the recent exhibition inside the Site-Museum of Pont du Gard, an archeological site in the south of France including a Roman aqueduct 50 km long.
The paper, through a comparison between the two case studies, aims to provide a presentation of the museums and their exhibitions and to reflect on the use of digital technologies for archaeological communication.