The Casa Viola predates the city as it looks today. Its layout follows the disposition of streets before the dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia imposed a rigid grid on Asunción in the early nineteenth century, squaring off the organic colonial street pattern that had developed over two and a half centuries. The house itself is a lesson in traditional Paraguayan construction: a tile roof set with a mud-based cement, a front gallery leading to a blacksmith's shop built over wooden beams and columns, and a rear passage demonstrating the culata yovai style of antique Paraguayan architecture. The roof combines palm and tacuara, a native bamboo. Where the city around it was rebuilt, straightened, and modernized, the Casa Viola preserved the texture of the old way of building.

The restoration began in 1991, driven by the Comisión V Centenario Paraguay as part of celebrations marking five hundred years since the European arrival in the Americas. The Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos, winner of the Premio Miguel de Cervantes, presented the Casa Viola project to the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, securing international support. Architect Carlos Colombino became the cultural center's first director and guided the museum's creation. It opened on August 14, 1996, its collections drawn from across Paraguay and from New York, Madrid, Paris, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. In 2005, the United States Embassy sponsored a conservation project to further preserve the site. The museum occupies just one building within the nine-structure Manzana de la Rivera complex, but it carries the weight of the entire city's narrative.

The collection moves through time without hurrying. Guaraní funeral urns, decorated with finger impressions and natural dyes, represent the indigenous pottery traditions that predated Spanish contact. A carved wooden door from the National Club, designed by architect Alejandro Ravizza and finished in 1860, speaks to the ambitions of the López era. Paraguay's national shield, created by José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia in 1820, appears in concrete relief. Colonial tiles from the Castelví House illustrate the blend of European and local architectural influences that shaped the city's built environment. A copy of the 1578 will of Doña Ysabel Venegas -- described as a "cross-bred and main woman, neighbor of Asunción city" -- offers a glimpse into the personal lives of the colonial period.

The museum's maps alone justify a visit. A colored map produced in Amsterdam in 1694 shows Paraguay as a province of the Río de la Plata, with the adjacent regions of Tucumán and Santa Cruz de la Sierra. A seventeenth-century map includes Asunción's early street plan. Musical scores from composer Carlos Federico Reyes, born in Asunción in 1909, sit alongside the original score of the polka "Recuerdos de Caacupé." In the colonial bedroom display, a wedding bed shares space with hammocks for adults and children, a saint's niche, and a candlestick beside the spot where families would have prayed the rosary together, a child passing the adults their mate. Jars of yerba from the Asunción Company recall the economic engine that mate represented. Each object is small. Taken together, they compose a portrait of daily life across four centuries.