The exhibition features a range of items brought home by sailors, soldiers, explorers, pilgrims, and you and I.... Image courtesy Time and Tide

Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service have raided their vaults and acquired a very special new artefact to put together an exhibition featuring 150 examples of souvenirs: trophies and treasures collected by soldiers, sailors, explorers, pilgrims, tourists and people like you and I.

Souvenir: To Have and to Hold runs until December 10 2006 and is designed to vividly illustrate how souvenirs bring our personal histories to life, by highlighting the stories behind the artefacts, with the help of free art activities and specialist curators’ talks.

The stories behind the artefacts will be brought to life by specialist curators' talks. Image courtesy of Time and Tide.

The exhibition is currently featuring a beautiful 3,000-year-old Egyptian figurine collected by the author Sir Henry Rider Haggard while navigating up the Nile in 1924.

Alongside this is an imposing walrus skull collected by William Mogg during one of the first Arctic expeditions, together with an intricately carved Buddhist apron (allegedly) made from human bone from Tibet.

But the centrepiece of the exhibition is an exquisite, specially acquired Limoges enamel plaque, possibly dating as far back as 1530s France, which was bought by Sir John Fountain in 1720 from the famous Florentine Medici family.

The Limoges enamel plaque, made circa 1530 in France, once owned by the Medici family. Image courtesy of Time and Tide

It is the first time that the plaque has been put on public display – the artefact was loaned to the exhibition through the help of The Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as various other art organisations.

The souvenir exhibition is the fifth in a programme of maritime exhibitions to be held at Time and Tide, through the Objective 2 European Union-funded Maritime Heritage East Programme.