Museo del Sannio

Benevento's provincial museum holds more than 50,000 objects, including Samnite armour, Roman statuary, Lombard grave goods, old master paintings and twentieth-century art. It occupies the monumental complex of Santa Sofia, a UNESCO-listed Lombard abbey with a Romanesque cloister.

Why it matters

The Museo del Sannio is the museum hub of the Province of Benevento and one of the principal collections of inland Campania. Its holdings, over fifty thousand artefacts, run from prehistory to the twentieth century, and they carry a particular weight because they come from the territory they describe: the Samnites, the mountain people who fought Rome three times, are documented here at their capital's doorstep, and the Longobards who made Benevento the capital of southern Lombardy after 570 left the objects of that court to the city.

The museum occupies two floors of the monumental complex of Santa Sofia. The abbey's eleventh-century church has belonged since 2011 to the UNESCO serial site "The Longobards in Italy. The Places of Power", together with its twelfth-century Romanesque cloister. Archaeological objects and historic architecture are presented within the same complex.

What to notice

The collections include Samnite and Roman material: ceramics from Sannio centres, inscriptions, portrait statuary and sarcophagi. The Lombard period is represented by finds from the duchy that ruled southern Italy. The picture gallery contains works from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and twentieth-century Italian art. Since 2014, another section has occupied the Infopoint on Piazza Matteotti, where Roman sculptures and sarcophagi are displayed. A provincial library and conference hall also form part of the complex. Egyptian antiquities from the former Museo del Sannio are now held at ARCOS on Corso Garibaldi, which also presents statuary from Benevento's temple of Isis.

Context and history

The museum's first nucleus dates to 1873, and its earliest home was the Rocca dei Rettori, the papal fortress by the river confluence; that building still preserves the museum's historical section, with documents, parchments and Risorgimento material on Benevento's past. In 1928 the provincial administration bought the abbatial complex of Santa Sofia and converted it into the provincial museum, moving the collections into the rooms around the Lombard church. A renovation of the north wing in the late 1990s expanded the display; the Palazzo Casiello wing and the 2014 Infopoint on Piazza Matteotti extended the museum beyond the abbey walls.

The museum is a polycentric institution, with collections and facilities in the abbey, palace, cloister, square and fortress.