Among the manifold activities of the Museum there is an important international scientific project, which it is leading, co-financed by the European Union, and that is POR Sicilia 2000-2006 Axis VI, Sub-measure 6.06C Network of Museums, Bodies for Research on and Tutelage of the Marine Cultural Patrimony of the Mediterranean (Local Code 1999.IT.16.1.PO.011/6.06C/9.3.13/0025).

This POR has the primary objective of putting in a network the Mediterranean museums and other institutions to stress the safeguarding and popularization of the marine and submarine patrimony, addressing first of all museums of the sea around the Mediterranean, with the intent of valorizing and protecting the sea and facilitating the advancement of scientific research.

The ambition of the Network is to profit by the experiences of museums that are already consolidated and advanced in order to give an impulse to little known and less developed institutions, to facilitate their growth by supporting them with all those cognitive supports, already experimented with and suited not only to scientific research but also preliminary to teaching, to the application of the new criteria for museum layouts, and to correct popularization, promotion and enjoyment. The project has made it possible to hold operational meetings with the partner museums, to hold significant international conferences, to publish special explanatory guides on each museum and to create a website, where all the institutions that are partners in the project will be consultable online.

The Itinerant exhibition The ways of the Sea inaugurated on 18.06.2007 at the d’Aumale Museum, the leader of the project, will be seen in 9 European partner museums: at the Greek Maritime Museum at Piraeus and at the Crete Maritime Museum at Chania, at the Pormoski at Piran in Slovenia, to the Naval Arsenal Historic Museum in Venice, at Galata in Genoa, at the Anton Dohrn Museum in Naples, at the Museu Maritim in Barcelona and at the Gibraltar Museum passing through the Fondacìon Provincial Marq at Alicante and the Musée de la Marine and de l’Economie in Marseille. The exhibition, divided into six sections, allows one to analyze the history and culture of the sea offering in diachronic terms the lines and principles of the man-sea relationship expressed through a multiplicity of items and social and natural contexts:

Each institution, each node in the net, is the object of a specific window inside a website accessible through multimedia booths but also online, inside the small pavilion that in fact constitutes the introduction to the itinerant exhibition.

1. The other face of the sky
   a section devoted to geological, biological and meteorological aspects, through maps and surveys of sea depths, tides, coasts and significant examples of what lives in the sea: taxidermic exemplars, models in papier mâché, in plaster and in plastics of the members of the different classes of the animal and vegetable taxonomy (fish, cephalopods, turtles, seals, algae and everything else included in the sea biosphere like sea birds), explained through photographic panels, multimedia videos and sound recordings of storms rendered through the use of jazz music, etc.
   
2. The games of exchange it
   a section devoted to garrisons, carriers, economy and legislation shows the fundamental role performed by the sea in the circulation of commodities and men. There are shown, with the support of archaeological finds, ancient geographical maps, portolanos and graphic representations together with pictorial representations, engravings and photographic images. There are also documented in multimedia videos the commercial itineraries and those of migratory flows (Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans) but also of the raids by corsairs (Byzantines, Saracens, Ottomans, Christians). Particular attention is paid – seeing its historical importance, with world extension – to the migratory phenomenon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Mediterranean countries above all in the direction of the American Continent.
   
3. Manual skills
   (shipbuilding, technologies and design, fishing and conservation, extraction, alimentation) this section concerns the whole range of activities, means and techniques in the different areas for exploitation of sea, animal and mineral resources by coastal populations during their history. The materials, the tools and the techniques for the construction of different types of boats are illustrated; the tools and the methods of collection, capture and conservation of the fish caught according to the various species; the structures (tubs, windmills) and the techniques for extraction and storing of sea salt.
   
4. The force of symbols
   a section devoted to art and craft, religious sentiment and rituality, languages and codes, literature, music, cinema. The sea has always been an object of symbolic perception; its manifold products (fish, shells, corals) have been turned into symbols of magic or sacred force. The artistic processing of some of them has given rise to specialist craftsmanship. The boats themselves that man has used for practical aims have taken on symbolic value (figureheads and sacred and magic images on the sides, sea Madonnas, etc).
   
5. Nautilus
   a section devoted to the encyclopaedic virtual library of the sea. This section, metaphorically conceived as Commander Nemo's library set up in his submarine, which sails and moves travelling in the sea depths, appears as the point of convergence and collection of all possible knowledge, of which the Mediterranean Sea itself is the depositary.