MUDIS — Museo Diocesano di Ischia
Ischia (NA)
Hidden gemMuseums
The story
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.
Access
€ ~5, reduced hours: phone ahead
More gems in Ischia
- Free beaches
Baia di Cartaromana
Ischia
A small bay looking out on the Castello Aragonese and the Sant'Anna rocks, where thermal springs warm the sea and the Torre di Guevara keeps watch from the meadow above the water.
VolcanoesMonte Epomeo
Ischia
The roof of the island at almost eight hundred metres: from the green tufo summit, with its hermitage carved into the rock, the eye takes in all of Ischia and the bay as far as Capri.
CastlesTorre di Guevara
Ischia
Raised at the end of the fifteenth century on the meadow of Cartaromana, the tower also known as di Michelangelo faces the Castello Aragonese and the Sant'Anna rocks, and now frames art exhibitions.
Sacred artCattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta (Ischia Ponte)
Ischia (NA)
When the cathedral on the Castello was destroyed by English cannon fire in 1809, the bishops moved down to the valley and built a new one at the foot of the bridge. Beneath the present church survives the medieval crypt with frescoes of the Giottesque school.
- 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.
Views & panoramasScogli di Sant'Anna
Ischia (NA)
Three teeth of rock facing the Castello Aragonese. Every 26 July the sea here fills with lit-up boats and at the end the Castello burns amid the fireworks: it is the Festa di Sant'Anna, and for one night the island re-enacts its own blaze.
More gems: Museums
- 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 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.