Museo Statale di Mileto

In a wing of the bishop's palace beside Mileto's cathedral, the State Museum gathers what the destroyed Norman capital left behind: Roman marbles reused by the first count, Norman capitals from the abbey, the sarcophagi of Mileto's feudal lords and an ivory crucifix attributed to Alessandro Algardi.

Why it matters

Mileto Antica, the Norman county capital destroyed by the earthquake of 1783, survives largely through this museum. It was established in 1990 through an agreement between the Ministry of Culture, the diocesan curia and local institutions to safeguard the finds from the ruined town, and the Comune records its inauguration in 1997 as a joint project of the Ministry, the Diocese of Mileto-Nicotera-Tropea, the Province of Vibo Valentia and the Comune. Its collections run from the late Roman imperial age to the nineteenth century over two floors of the Palazzo Vescovile, a building begun in the late eighteenth century and completed around 1860 under Bishop Filippo Mincione. The museum also provides context for the archaeological park on the hills above the town.

What to notice

The ground and first floors display ancient and medieval marbles, ceramics and paintings. The most telling objects are the fine Roman marbles that Roger the Great Count had reused to decorate the abbey of the Santissima Trinità, including an eleventh-century marble bracket capital carved for the Norman church. Nearby are Roman finds probably brought from ancient Hipponium (Vibo Valentia) and a notable group of Norman capitals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries from the former abbey and the old cathedral, together with fragments of polychrome painted glass. On the second floor, the first room holds fourteenth-century material, including the remains of the great sarcophagi of Ruggero Sanseverino and Giovanna d'Aquino, feudal lords of the Angevin era, with works attributed to the master known as the "Maestro di Mileto". Four further rooms of sacred art hold a fifteenth-century thurible, a sixteenth-century incense boat, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century busts of San Nicola di Bari and San Fortunato, an ivory crucifix attributed to Alessandro Algardi, a seventeenth-century slate icon of St Nicholas, vestments, devotional paintings and the "Madonna della Pace" by Giuseppe Naso.

Context and history

The museum's subject is the town that stood on the hills until 1783. Granted by Robert Guiscard to his brother Roger I in 1058, Mileto became the seat of the Norman county of Calabria and a Latin episcopal seat; Roger founded there the abbey of the Santissima Trinità, an important religious foundation of Norman Mileto. The bishop's palace that now houses the collection grew from the late eighteenth century beside the neoromanesque cathedral — raised to a minor papal basilica in 2016 — so the museum sits in the institutional quarter of the resettled town, in a direct line of succession from the destroyed Mileto Vecchia.