Museo Diocesano di Benevento

Benevento's Diocesan Museum combines sacred art from across the Sannio with an archaeological route beneath the cathedral. Its underground sequence spans Neolithic settlement, Samnite and Roman remains, an early Christian basilica and the Romanesque cathedral destroyed in 1943.

Why it matters

The upper rooms preserve paintings, sculpture, reliquaries, liturgical furnishings and manuscripts from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Below the cathedral, excavations reveal successive phases of the city's history, including a Samnite place of worship, Roman structures, an early Christian basilica and remains of the earlier cathedral.

What to notice

Excavations begun in 2005 revealed Neolithic huts with wooden frames and clay walls, a Samnite cult building of tufa blocks, settlement associated with the Latin colony of the mid-third century BCE, and an imperial-era covered market. Above these remains are foundations of a probably fifth-century basilica dedicated to the Mother of God and the Romanesque cathedral, destroyed in the Anglo-American bombing of September 1943. The present cathedral was rebuilt between 1950 and 1965.

The pseudo-crypt has two transverse naves divided by reused columns. Its fresco fragments include a cycle of Saint Barbatus dated between the late ninth and early tenth century, an early-fourteenth-century Madonna enthroned and images of Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

The treasury includes the seventh-century iron cathedra of Saint Barbatus with traces of silver inlay; an eighth-century silver pectoral cross; a tenth-century gold-sheet cross associated with Bishop Pietro Sagacissimo, who died in 914; funerary inscriptions of Lombard princes; reliquaries; and a golden rose given in 1725 by Archbishop Vincenzo Maria Orsini, later Pope Benedict XIII. Fragments of the early-fourteenth-century ambo carved by Nicola da Monteforte preserve another part of the cathedral's medieval history.

Context and history

The museum opened in 1981 during the episcopate of Bishop Raffaele Calabria, on the initiative of Monsignor Giovanni Giordano. Its underground route opened in 2012 and was completed in stages through 2023, including conservation of the pseudo-crypt frescoes. Together with the nearby Arco del Sacramento, it forms part of Benevento's urban archaeological landscape.

The museum belongs to the Provincial Museum Network, with management and promotion delegated to the Fondazione Benedetto Bonazzi.