MEC | Museo Emozionale di Craco, presso il Convento di San Pietro

Inside the restored Franciscan monastery at the gate of Craco Vecchia, the Museo Emozionale di Craco tells the story of the medieval hill town and its abandonment through a multimedia exhibition.

Why it matters

An abandoned town is hard to read without help, and the MEC exists to provide it. The regional tourism board describes the museum as the access door to the "paese fantasma" of Craco — the point where visitors gather the story of the community that lived on the hill for centuries and left it within a single decade. Housed in the old monastery of San Pietro dei Frati Minori at Contrada Monastero, the museum reopened the building to public life in 2016, providing an interpretive introduction to the ruined town.

What to notice

The building is an exhibit in itself. The museum's rooms occupy the restored spaces of the seventeenth-century Franciscan house, and the visit route moves between the cloister, the open terraces above the clay calanchi, a projection room and a hall with exhibition areas — a sequence that alternates close interpretation with wide views of the abandoned town on its ridge. The multimedia installation traces the working town, the landslide that struck in 1963 and the departure of families to the new settlement in the valley. The display uses the monastery's own geometry, with rooms arranged around the cloister.

Context and history

The museum was born with the rehabilitation of the monastery. Its new displays were inaugurated on 25 June 2016, in spaces that local reporting described as recently restored, and the project gave the Franciscan complex a public role it had lost when Craco was abandoned. The multimedia installation presents the story of the once-inhabited hill town within the restored Franciscan complex.