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The Civic Museum of Viterbo is housed in the cloister and nunnery belonging to the church of S. Maria della Verità. It has been reopened in December 1994, after a renovation of the display and the collection; its patrimony is now exposed on three exhibition levels, and variously organized within two big chronological sections: the Andent Age, ranging from the Iron Age to the Roman period, on the lower floor, and the Middle and Modern Ages, until the XVIII century, on the upper floors.
The first display room is dedicated to Annio of Viterbo and to the false relics he fancifully connected to the Etruscan history of the town, starting up at the end of the XV century a course of research on the town itself and the surrounding areas, through the recovery and preservation of the authentic findings, which is the starting point of museum institution.
The archaelogical section begins with a gallery of sarcophagi, placed all around the cloister, and is made up of findings from the Viterbese area, along a chronological range going from the VIII century b.C. to the III century a.C., through the Etruscan and Roman civilizations; particularly remarkable, not only for the museum history is a collection gathered by Mr. Luigi Rossi Danielli at the beginning of the century which bears precious witness to the typological groups of Southern Etruria handiworks.
The historic-artistic section was created after the unification of Italy, owing to the flow of works of art from town churches and monasteries; it preserves a remarkable group of Medieval sculpture and pointings, among which the Madonna con Bambino by Vitale from Bologna, and the Sfinge by Pasquale Romano, stand out; in the area dedicated to the Modern Age, the attention is drawn by the Pietà and the Flagellazione by Sebastiano del Piombo, as well as by the rich painting exhibition of the "Viterbese School", from Balletta to Pastura, and by the various artworks of the local artistical culture in the XVI, XVII and XVIII century, represented by artists like Giovan Francesco Romanelli, and enriched by the contribution of foreign painters like Salvator Rosa, Antiveduto Grammatica and Aurelio Lomi, whose extraordinary canvas Morte di Maria can be admired.
The third display level houses the minor and the applied arts, and the historical records. lt includes the exhibition of a Papal treasure of the XVI century and a chemistry ceramic outfit of the XVIII century, as well as a collection of plans for the construction of the so-colled "Macchina di Santa Rosa", dating back to the XVII century, and a gallery of portraits of the XVIII and XIX century, where a lot of characters linked to the origin and development of the Museum civic collection can be recognized. |
