Muscat – Jamal bin Hassan al Moosawi, Secretary-General of National Museum of Oman, has been awarded the Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy by Sergio Mattarella, President of Italy.

The award was presented during a ceremony held at the residence of H E Federica Favi, Ambassador of Italy in Oman, on Sunday.

H E Federica praised the role of Moosawi in contributing to strengthening bilateral relations in the cultural sphere between Oman and Italy since 2011.

There was significant cultural cooperation during the founding of the National Museum project, especially in the fields of preservation, conservation, development of museum narratives, and hosting of an exhibition titled ‘Visionists: Forty Years of Italian Archaeological Research in the Sultanate of Oman’ in 2019.

The exhibition was dedicated to the excavators and authors of archaeological studies conducted in Oman.

The National Museum participated in a lecture accompanying an exhibition on perfumes at Turin Archaeology Museum in 2020, and hosted ‘Incensum’ in cooperation with the Italian Perfume Foundation in 2021, which included loaned artefacts from Italy and an Omani archaeological collection.

The exhibition in the Land of Frankincense gallery was open to the public for a period of three months.

Both exhibitions dealt with civilisational, historical and religious dimensions and the role that Oman played across the ages in cultural and commercial exchange through frankincense.