Regional museum of Messina

Building

The building housing the museum was originally the Barbera-Mellinghoff spinning-mill, a late 19th-century construction chosen after the great earthquake of 1908 to be the site of the future museum, which was refurbished and finally opened in 1922. Over the years the building has been considerably restructured in order to guarantee the exhibits the best possible conditions for their preservation; the last major work was carried out in the 1980s. A new large complex of buildings near the present site was completed in 2010s.

Collections

The original collections came from the Museo Civico. After the earthquake in 1908 these were expanded by the addition of paintings, sculptures and precious decorative works from damaged or destroyed buildings, thus creating a collection of paintings and sculptures by internationally known and local artists, together with a variety of other objets d'art.

Exhibition

The museum was organized on historicistic principles: each area contains the most important works of the same period, regardless of their typological class.

Rooms 5-8 Paintings, sculptures, funerary monuments and works of decorative art of the 16th century

History

The first nucleus for the museum's collection came with various private collections of conservative taste. First opened in 1806 as the Museo civico peloritano by the Reale Accademia Peloritana "to end the despoliation of art", its formation was the idea of its first director Carmelo La Farina. It housed the Alojsio, Arenaprimo, Ciancialo, Grosso-Cacopardo and Carmisino family collections as well as a collection of 14th- to 18th-century paintings owned by the city's senate, which also part-funded its running costs.

It was initially based on via Rovere, near the Archivio degli atti notarili, before being moved to former university buildings, then (after its massive expansion from the collections of religious corporations suppressed by the 1866 liquidation laws) in 1884 to a building on via Peculio Frumentario and from 1891 to 1908 to the former monastery of San Gregorio.

In the rooms of the former monastery, following acquisitions and hereditary legacies, a copious amount of heterogeneous materials were formed and sedimented: in addition to the movables and objects of cultural use, coming from the ecclesiastical heritage, and the oil paintings from various eras and schools, also a rich numismatic collection, typologically classified into Mamertine, Greek and Roman Republican coins from the 2nd to the 1st century, mostly coming from the collection of Grosso-Cacopardo and his heirs purchased and donated to the Museum by the Municipality of Messina. …