Palazzo Abbaziale di Loreto
Mercogliano (AV)
KnownMuseums
The story
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.
Access
FREE guided tours by booking, Mon/Wed/Fri 9:30-11:00, max 30 people
More gems in Mercogliano
Sacred artSantuario di Montevergine
Mercogliano
Clinging to the Partenio, the sanctuary guards the dark Madonna the pilgrims call Mamma Schiavona; you climb by funicular, through beech woods and mist, to look out over the whole of Irpinia.
- Villages
Capocastello di Mercogliano
Mercogliano (AV)
The medieval borgo (old village) below the castle, largely abandoned after the earthquakes: arches, stairs that lead to no door any more, and overhead the shadow of Montevergine.
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 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.