Musei nazionali di Matera

The Musei nazionali di Matera are a state museum system, not a single door. Under their 2024 name they unite the archaeology of the Museo Domenico Ridola, the medieval and modern art of Palazzo Lanfranchi, and the former San Rocco hospital with its frescoed Cristo Flagellato church, spreading two millennia of Lucanian history across several buildings.

Why it matters

Matera's state collections were reorganised recently and deliberately. An autonomous special institute was created by a December 2019 decree, and a ministerial decree of 9 February 2024 renamed it from the singular Museo nazionale di Matera to the plural Musei nazionali di Matera, acknowledging what visitors already encounter: a network of sites rather than one museum. Another decree, of 13 July 2022, folded in the monumental complex of the ex Ospedale San Rocco with the Chiesa del Cristo Flagellato. Together the sites carry the region's story from Pleistocene fossils and prehistoric villages through Greek colonisation, medieval painting and Neapolitan Baroque collecting to twentieth-century artists who made Basilicata their subject.

What to notice

At the Ridola seat, the ground floor recounts the museum's own history beside a visitor centre hung with photographs by Mario Cresci, and the exhibit Giuliana degli abissi presents the skull and remains of a whale that swam over Lucanian land about one and a half million years ago. The prehistoric rooms reconstruct vanished environments; the upper floor turns to the eighth century BC and Matera's Greek contacts, closing with the figured vases of the Collezione Rizzon. A multisensory route named Tiresia, designed for visitors with hearing and visual disabilities, is in itself a point of interest. At Palazzo Lanfranchi the collection divides into Arte del Territorio, Collezionismo and Arte Contemporanea across twelve rooms plus the Levi room, and at the ex Ospedale San Rocco the ethnographic section interprets Sassi life through objects of agropastoral culture.

Context and history

The Ridola museum was founded by an act of parliament on 9 February 1911, when the state accepted the free donation of the collection that Domenico Ridola, a physician and self-taught archaeologist, had assembled from digs in the Matera region. Ridola's fieldwork had already proved human presence in the area back to the Palaeolithic, through finds in the Grotta dei Pipistrelli and funerary caves, as the regional tourism authority recalls. The collection was first displayed in four rooms of the classical lyceum E. Duni and then moved to the former convent of Santa Chiara, which the municipality granted to the state in perpetuity. Palazzo Lanfranchi followed into state museum use much later, inaugurated as a gallery in 2003, before the 2019-2024 reform bound the sites into the single institute that now manages them.