Museum sights in Italy
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Vatican Museums
Visiting the Vatican Museums is an unforgettable experience that requires strength, stamina and patience. You’ll need to be on top of your game to endure the inevitable queues – if not for a ticket then for the security checks – and enjoy what is undoubtedly one of the world’s great museum complexes.
Founded by Pope Julius II in the early 16th century and enlarged by successive pontiffs, the museums are housed in what is known collectively as the Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano. This massive 5.5-hectare complex consists of two palaces – the Vatican palace nearest St Peter’s and the Belvedere Palace – joined by two long galleries. On the inside are three courtyards: th…
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Museo Nazionale Romano: Palazzo Altemps
Just north of Piazza Navona, Palazzo Altemps is a gem. A beautiful, late-15th-century palazzo, it houses the best of the Museo Nazionale Romano’s formidable collection of classical sculpture. Many of the pieces come from the celebrated Ludovisi collection, amassed by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi in the 17th century. Prize exhibits include the 5th-century Trono Ludovisi (Ludovisi Throne), a carved marble throne depicting Aphrodite being plucked from the sea as a newborn babe. It shares a room with two colossal heads, one of which is the goddess Juno and dates from around 600 BC. The wall frieze (about half of which remains) depicts the 10 plagues of Egypt and the Exodus. E…
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Certosa di San Martino
The high point (quite literally) of Neapolitan baroque, this stunning charterhouse, Certosa Di San Martino, is home to the Museo Nazionale di San Martino. Founded as a Carthusian monastery in the 14th century, the Certosa owes most of its present look to facelifts in the 16th and 17th centuries, the latter by baroque maestro Cosimo Fanzago. The church and the rooms that flank it contain a feast of frescoes and paintings by Naples’ greatest 17th-century artists – Francesco Solimena, Massimo Stanzione, Giuseppe de Ribera and Battista Caracciolo.
Adjacent to the church, the elegant Chiostro dei Procuratori is the smaller of the monastery’s two cloisters. A grand corridor…
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Museo Nazionale del Cinema
A decade ago, the tower became home to the multifloored Museo Nazionale del Cinema, which takes you on a fantastic tour through cinematic history – from the earliest magic lanterns, stereoscopes and other optical toys to the present day. Movie memorabilia on display includes Marilyn Monroe’s black lace bustier, Peter O’Toole’s robe from Lawrence of Arabia and the coffin used by Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. At the heart of the museum, the vast Temple Hall is surrounded by 10 interactive ‘chapels’ devoted to various film genres.
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Museo Carlo Bilotti
The art collection of billionaire cosmetics magnate Carlo Bilotti is stylishly housed in the Orangery of Villa Borghese. It’s a small collection (only 22 pieces), but it’s interesting and well presented with explanatory panels in English and Italian. Paintings range from a Warhol portrait of Bilotti’s wife and daughter to 18 works by Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), one of Italy’s most important 20th-century artists. There’s also a fine selection of landscapes by Alessandro Poma (1874–1960).
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Messner Mountain Museum
The rambling castle, Castel Firmiano, and its grounds are home to the Messner Mountain Museum created by mountaineer Reinhold Messner as the centrepiece of his five mountain museums. Based around man’s relationship with the mountains across all cultures, this insightful museum is configured so that you climb literally hundreds of stairs, giving you the experience of shifting altitudes. You’ll need to wear sturdy shoes for the uneven terrain and mesh walkways; wheelchair access is not possible.
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Museo della Musica
Housed in the restored neoclassical Chiesa di San Maurizio, this collection of rare and often very curious instruments spans the 17th to 19th centuries and is accompanied by informative panels on the life and times of Antonio Vivaldi. To hear how these instruments sound in action, check out the kiosk with a range of early-music CDs and ticket point for Interpreti Veneziani, who fund this museum and play museum-piece instruments with modern verve around the corner at San Vidal.
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Museo Archeologico dell’Alto Adige
The star of the Museo Archeologico dell’Alto Adige is Ötzi, the Iceman. The so-called Iceman’s clothing and equipment is on display, while his still-frozen body is kept in a separate, temperature-controlled room and can be viewed through a tiny window. Ötzi aside, the museum also has an important collection of archaeological finds.
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Museo Nazionale Romano: Palazzo Massimo alle Terme
A treasure trove of classical art, the light-filled Museo Nazionale Romano: Palazzo Massimo alle Terme is one of Rome’s finest museums, yet receives only a smattering of visitors.
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Museo Ebraico & Jewish Ghetto
This area in Venice was once a getto (foundry) on an island away from the main area of Cannaregio to contain the risk of fire – but its role as the designated Jewish quarter from the 16th to 18th centuries gave the word a whole new meaning. In accordance with the Venetian Republic’s 1516 decree, Jewish artisans and lenders stocked and funded Venice’s commercial enterprises by day, while at night and on Christian holidays, they were restricted to the gated island of the Ghetto Nuovo. If you scan the top floors of the buildings ringing the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, you can spot three synagogues, or schole (literally, ‘schools’), distinguished from the residential housing…
reviewed
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Museo Storico Navale
Maritime madness spans four storeys and 42 rooms at this museum of Venice’s seafaring history, featuring full-scale boats including the ducal barge, Peggy Guggenheim’s not-so-minimalist gondola, ocean liners, and WWII battleships. Your first port of call on the ground floor are sprawling galleries of fearsome weaponry – cannons, blunderbusses, swords and sabres – with hardly any noticeable bloodstains. These big guns were rarely needed in Venice, since the shallow, difficult-to-sail lagoon itself was Venice’s best protection against invaders. Check out the 17th-century diorama maps, which show the incredible span of Venetian ports and forts across the Adriatic and Mediter…
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Museo di Torcello
Across the square from the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta in the 13th-century Palazzo del Consiglio is this museum dedicated to the island. On the ground floor are some sculptural fragments from the cathedral, a 6th-century holy-water font and a curious display of Byzantine objects from Constantinople. Upstairs, you’ll find a series of surprisingly dark religious paintings from the workshops of Veronese, and sundry ancient office supplies from Torcello’s bureaucracy, including a 7th-century lead seal that must have made paperwork downright toxic. The museum’s ancient artefacts are held in the Palazzo dell’Archivio, opposite the Palazzo del Consiglio. They inclu…
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Fondaco dei Turchi
The dukes of Ferrara had the run of this 12th-century mansion until they were elbowed aside in 1621 to make room for Venice’s most important trading partner: Turkey. For centuries the building served as a way station and warehouse for Turkish merchants, who were a constant in Venice throughout the on-again, off-again relationship between maritime powers, celebrated with favoured-nation trading status and inter-Adriatic weddings, and marred by occasional acts of piracy, invasion and looting. The Fondaco dei Turchi remained rented out to the Turks until 1858, after which the place underwent a disastrous modernisation that left few reminders of its medieval origins. Original…
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Ca’ Pesaro
Eclectic collections ranging from a Klimt masterpiece to samurai swords span three floors of this Baldassare Longhena– designed 1710 palazzo. When the palace was donated to the city as a showcase for new ideas in 1902, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna began with the boosterish early days of the Biennale, showcasing Venetian landscapes, Venetian painters (notably Giacomo Favretto), and Venetian socialites embodying mythological virtues. But savvy Biennale collectors soon diversified, snapping up pivotal works such as Gustav Klimt’s 1909 Judith II (Salome) and Marc Chagall’s Rabbi of Vitebsk (1914–22). The De Lisi Bequest in 1961 added Kandinskys and Morandis to the mo…
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Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica – Palazzo Barberini
A must for anyone into Renaissance and baroque art, this sumptuous gallery is housed in one of Rome’s most spectacular palazzi. Commissioned by the Barberini pope Urban VIII in 1623, it was worked on by a who’s-who of 17th-century architects, including Carlo Maderno, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini – check out their rival staircases within the building. Pietro da Cortona painted the breathtaking fresco Trionfo della Divina Provvidenza (Triumph of Divine Providence), in the main 1st-floor salon, between 1633 and 1639. The gallery, on the 1st floor, contains a superb selection of 16th- to 17th-century works, including paintings by Raphael, Caravaggio, Gui…
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Museo della Follia
The San Servolo hospital has been partly opened as the Museo della Follia (Museum of Madness). Two intriguing rooms are full of paraphernalia and explanations of the days when being sent to San Servolo was hardly a guaranteed cure. In the first room is a series of before/after photos of 19th-century inmates, many of whose chief malady was extreme poverty, with hallucinations and non-specific symptoms resulting from bad nutrition and vitamin deficiency. In the main room are instruments used for electro-shock therapy, while in an annexe are other ‘therapeutic’ instruments, including chains and straitjackets. Of particular interest is the ancient pharmacy, where for ce…
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Giardino di Boboli
Despite the volumes of visitors and a slightly shop-worn mien, the Boboli gardens remain both a marvel of Tuscan Renaissance landscape architecture and, in its further reaches, a fine escape from the tourist hordes. Perhaps its most impressive feature is the stately VialedeiCipressi, a grand, cypress-lined avenue that leads down to Isolotto, a marvellous ornamental pond adorned with a marble Neptune and nymphs and, in warmer weather, fragrant citrus trees. Nearer the Palazzo Pitti, a fleshy Venus by Giambologna rises from the waves in the Grotta del Buontalenti, a fanciful grotto designed by the eponymous artist. Don’t miss the haunting ‘face’ sculpture (1998) by Polish s…
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Palazzo Pantaleo
Carry on down Via Duomo and take a left onto Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. Here you'll find the Palazzo Pantaleo , the temporary home of the city's archaeological collection. We say 'temporary' but the edited selection of artefacts on display has actually been here for seven years now. Still, it's certainly worth the visit as it exhibits the most sophisticated works of Magna Graecia that you're likely to see anywhere in Puglia.
Particularly fine are the ceramics, which Taranto precociously developed in its potteries during the 4th century and sold throughout the Greek world. There are lots of Corinthian and Laconian ceramics, but the best pieces are the superb black-and-red…
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Museo Correr
Napoleon mowed down a church on this spot to make way for a grand ballroom, but he didn’t have long to kick up his boots in his Ala Napoleonica – within a couple years of the building’s completion, the Austrians took over Venice. When Venice won its independence, it also gained these imperial digs with all the trimmings: ancient maps, Graeco-Roman statuary and splendid medieval paintings. Stride through these salons towards the Palazzo Ducale, and at the end you’ll reach Jacopo Sansovino’s spectacular 16th-century Libreria Nazionale Marciana, with representations of wisdom by Veronese and Titian. Temporary shows in the neoclassical ballroom on such themes as fut…
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Museo del Bargello
Crowds clamour to see David, but few rush to Michelangelo’s early works in the Bargello. The artist was just 22 when a cardinal commissioned him to create the drunken Bacchus displayed in the ground-floor hall. His large roundel of the Madonna and Child with the infant St John, known as Tondo Pitti, portrays the halo-bare pair in a very human light. However, the collection’s most illustrious member is another David. Donatello’s bronze version from the 1440s, the first freestanding nude to be sculpted since classical times, is elegant and slenderly androgynous – a curious contrast from Michelangelo’s he-man version. These are just a few highlights of an extraordinary c…
reviewed
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Museo Civico di Santa Caterina
While on the right bank of the canal make for the Museo Civico di Santa Caterina . The church and its attached convent and cloisters house many of the city's art treasures. In the church itself are remarkable frescoes attributed to Gentile da Fabriano (who worked in the early 15th century). The beautiful Cappella degli Innocenti contains remarkably fresh and vivid frescoes by two contemporary artists, depicting the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary.
To these have been added the extraordinary fresco cycle by Tomaso da Modena (1326-79) on the life and martyrdom of St Ursula, recovered late in the 19th century from another already partly demolished church.Over two floors o…
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Museo del Vetro
Murano has displayed its glass-making prowess at the Museo del Vetro since 1861. Downstairs, 3rd-century iridescent Roman glass is featured alongside Maria Grazia Rosin’s 1992 postmodern detergent jug in impeccably blown glass. Upstairs, technical explanations detail the process for making murrine, the technique used in making Venetian trade beads. The section on glass mosaics explains the mineral sources and chemical reactions that produce specific colours, and by way of example, shows miniature portraits in glass that are outsized masterworks of technique. To the left is the frescoed Salone Maggiore (Grand Salon), with displays ranging from 17th-century winged goblets…
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Museo Diocesiano
The Museo Diocesiano houses an important and rather extensive collection of artworks from the cathedral and churches destroyed during WWII; these include paintings, and marble, fresco and mosaic fragments. There's a friendly guide who will explain the significance of each piece (they are largely unmarked), though she speaks Italian and French only.
The ground floor holds 15th-century frescoes, along with Byzantine paintings and icons, among which the most beautiful is the 1171 Madonna della Perla, rescued from the now-no-more church of San Nicoló Reale.
Seek out the room dedicated to the 17th-century Sicilian painter Pietro Novelli (1603-47), who was one of the region's f…
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Museo Inter & Milan
Officially it’s called Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, after a Milanese champion of the 1930s and ‘40s, but to football fans it’s simply San Siro. Milan’s two football teams AC Milan and FC Internazionale (Inter) play here every weekend from October to May. The distinctive red-girdered roof and striped concrete towers were added when the stadium was renovated for the 1990 World Cup, the design also boosting its capacity to 85,700. Serie A fans head for the Museo Inter e Milan, boasting nonstop screenings of matches, memorabilia and trophies galore. Carnival-style papier-mâché dummies of two-dozen football stars (spot your favourite: Gullit, Rijkaard and Matthaus are all t…
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Museo/Chiesa di San Marco
Endowed generously by Cosimo il Vecchio, this former Dominican monastery was an important font of early Renaissance art thanks mostly to its most famous resident, Fra Angelico. The attention to perspective and realistic portrayal of nature have lead critics to call Fra Angelico’s Deposizione di Cristo (Deposition of Christ; 1432) one of the first true paintings of the Renaissance. Fra Angelico was commissioned to produce this painting only because the original painter died. The early-Renaissance architecture of Michelozzo, especially his Chiostro di Sant’Antonio (1440), is also impressive. However, it is the monks’ cells that are most haunting. At the top of the stairs …
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