Museums
30 places
- Museums
Ospedale delle Bambole
Napoli
Behind a shop window in Palazzo Marigliano a craftsman mends glass eyes, porcelain arms and dolls' curls, in a workshop born more than a century ago.
MuseumsVilla San Michele (Axel Munthe)
Anacapri
The white house that Swedish doctor Axel Munthe built among ancient columns and pergolas, with its granite sphinx gazing out over the Gulf of Naples.
- Museums
Museo MEdA
(AV)
Room after room it rebuilds the peasant world of the Alta Irpinia: trades, objects and rites of a vanished civilisation, where daily life was interwoven with magic and superstition.
- Museums
Il Torrione (Museo Civico Giovanni Maltese)
Forio (NA)
Built in 1480 to spot Saracen sails, this cylinder of tufo (volcanic tuff) became four centuries later the home-studio of the sculptor Giovanni Maltese, who lived here into the twentieth century. Today his sculptures still inhabit the tower that once had to defend Forio from pirates.
- Museums
Villa La Colombaia (Museo Luchino Visconti)
Forio (NA)
Here Luchino Visconti wrote, quarrelled and hid from the world, among the holm oaks of Zaro and a view that slips straight into his films. The director wanted to be buried here: the park is still his, more than the villa.
- Museums
Museo del Mare (Palazzo dell'Orologio)
Ischia (NA)
Three floors of nets, ex voto, models and photographs of men who set out to sea and never returned. It is the museum the fishermen of Ischia Ponte built for themselves, in the clock tower palace that marked the rhythm of their departures.
- Museums
MUDIS — Museo Diocesano di Ischia
Ischia (NA)
Silverware, vestments and painted panels gathered from the island's churches after earthquakes and collapses. It is the storehouse of Ischia's sacred memory, and almost no tourist ever opens its doors.
- Museums
Museo Civico di Procida "Sebastiano Tusa"
Procida (NA)
Named after the underwater archaeologist who died in the 2019 Ethiopian air disaster, it gathers what the sea around Procida has given back. It stands in the same complex from which, for two centuries, people looked out at the prison.
- Museums
Museo Casa di Graziella
Procida (NA)
A reconstruction of a Procida house for Graziella, the girl invented (or perhaps not) by Lamartine, who fell in love with her and let her die of grief in his novel. Every year Procida still elects a Graziella: a literary ghost the island cannot give up.
- Museums
Museo del Sottosuolo
Napoli (NA)
Cisterns, tunnels and wells under Piazza Cavour, where the munaciello (little monk of Neapolitan lore) is not a fairy tale but the trade of those who worked down here: small, hooded, always in the shadows.
- Museums
MUSA — Museo di Anatomia Umana
Napoli (NA)
Skeletons, foetuses in formalin, bodies petrified with Giuseppe Aloe's nineteenth-century method. One of the most striking anatomical collections in Europe, inside a former monastery, and almost nobody knows it.
- Museums
Museo delle Arti Sanitarie e Farmacia degli Incurabili
Napoli (NA)
Surgical instruments that look like torture tools, the lazaretto ward, and the most beautiful eighteenth-century pharmacy in Europe: carved wood, majolica jars, and a poison jar with an inscription that chills you.
- Museums
Museo Hermann Nitsch
Napoli (NA)
In a former power station: the blood-soaked canvases, the vestments and the instruments of Hermann Nitsch's Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries. This is not art for everyone: it is a rite.
MuseumsMuseo Civico Gaetano Filangieri
Napoli (NA)
Armour, porcelain, paintings and the library of a collector prince, in a Renaissance palace that in the nineteenth century was taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt thirty metres further along.
- Museums
Il Cartastorie — Museo dell'Archivio del Banco di Napoli
Napoli (NA)
Eighty kilometres of shelving holding the records of the oldest banking archive in the world: inside are the payments to Caravaggio, the debts of noblemen, five centuries of Neapolitan lives. The pages light up and tell their stories.
MuseumsMuseo Duca di Martina — Villa Floridiana
Napoli (NA)
Six thousand pieces of decorative art — Meissen porcelain, ivories, corals — in a white villa built by a king for his morganatic wife, at the top of a park looking over the bay.
MuseumsVilla Pignatelli
Napoli (NA)
A neoclassical villa left exactly as it was: the halls, the library, the little red drawing room. And, in the annexe, the carriage museum — with the park all around, in the middle of Chiaia's traffic.
- Museums
Musei universitari delle Scienze Naturali
Napoli (NA)
In the baroque halls of the Collegio dei Gesuiti: giant crystals donated by the Bourbons, whale skeletons hanging from the ceiling, skulls, mummies and foetuses in display cases. It costs about the price of one and a half coffees.
- Museums
MuSA — Museo dell'Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte
Napoli (NA)
The first observatory of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with its nineteenth-century brass telescopes, on a terrace overlooking the whole of Naples. On some evenings you really do watch the stars.
- Museums
Museo della Fondazione Nunziatella
Napoli (NA)
Inside the oldest military school in Italy, the eighteenth-century church is a jewel of marble and stucco that almost nobody sees — and from here came both the royalists and the revolutionaries of 1799.
- Museums
M.A.V.I. — Museo Antiquarium di Lacedonia
Lacedonia (AV)
Beneath the square slept a Daunian necropolis: vases, ornaments and the bones of a people who traded here a thousand years before Rome.
- Museums
Palazzo Abbaziale di Loreto
Mercogliano (AV)
A palace by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro guarding 200,000 volumes, codices and incunabula, and an eighteenth-century pharmacy with its jars still in place, as if the apothecary monk had just stepped out.
- Museums
MuGesS — Museo della Gente Senza Storia (miniera di zolfo)
Altavilla Irpina (AV)
For a century thousands of men went down into the sulphur mine discovered in 1866: yellow dust in the lungs, silicosis, and a wealth that was never theirs. The museum gives a name back to those history never wrote down.
- Museums
MuDea — Museo delle Acque
Caposele (AV)
The story of the waterworks that carried Irpinia's water to a thirsty Puglia: an epic of labourers, tunnels and engineering that nobody tells any more.
MuseumsMuseo Civico Archeologico di Bisaccia
Bisaccia (AV)
The Princess of Bisaccia sleeps here: a princely tomb of the 7th century BC with its gold, found in a land long believed to have always been poor.
- Museums
Casa Museo di San Giuseppe Moscati
Santa Lucia di Serino (AV)
The home of the doctor of the poor, the saint who visited the alleys of Naples for free: plain furniture, and the feeling that he never really left.
MuseumsMUCIRAMA — Museo Civico Raffaele Marrocco
Piedimonte Matese (CE)
In the former convent of San Tommaso d'Aquino sleep the Runner and the Zeus of Cila: Samnite bronzes pulled out of the mountain just above. A free museum nobody expects in a mountain town.
MuseumsMuseo Archeologico Biagio Greco
Mondragone (CE)
A small provincial museum guarding the fragments of the ager Falernus: votive terracottas, grave goods, the remains brought back up from Sinuessa, the Roman city that today sleeps beneath the sand and the sea.
- Museums
Museo Archeologico dell'Antica Calatia
Maddaloni (CE)
Inside a residence of the Carafa family sleeps the vanished city of Calatia: grave goods from the 8th century BC and an immersive room where the paving stones of the Appia light up beneath your feet as you walk towards Rome.
MuseumsJanua — Museo delle Streghe
Benevento (BN)
Herbs of power, ex voto, anthropomorphic fetishes and an artificial walnut tree that lights up in the dark: here the janara (Benevento witch) stops being a joke and goes back to being restless anthropology.