Museo della Bussola e del Ducato Marinaro

Behind the vaulted aisles of the medieval shipyard, Amalfi keeps the documents and objects of its thousand-year seafaring story: law codes, coins, compasses and manuscripts that explain how a small republic organised Mediterranean trade and gave the mariner's compass its Western debut.

Why it matters

Opened in 2010 around the historic core of the old civic collection, the museum is devoted to Amalfi's maritime republic and the duchy that followed under Norman rule. Its holdings include instruments, texts and coins that document a commercial civilisation. They include a maritime code governing Mediterranean shipping and gold tarì that circulated from Cairo to Constantinople. The galleries occupy the Arsenal, where Amalfi's galleys were built.

What to notice

The Tabula de Amalpha, Amalfi's maritime customary law, remained in force around the Mediterranean until the sixteenth century. The museum also presents the Consuetudines Civitatis Amalphiae of 1274, the city's statute book. The Pandette di Giustiniani, codices of Justinian's compilation, were taken when the Pisans sacked the town in 1135; the museum holds a nineteenth-century anastatic reproduction made in 1910. Amalfi's gold tarì was struck on the Arab model. Tradition credits Flavio Gioia with inventing the compass, while the museum's account describes its transmission from China to the West through Amalfitan sailors, who adopted and refined it for navigation. Other holdings include Byzantine-style New Year costumes and preparatory sketches Domenico Morelli made for the cathedral facade fronton.

Context and history

The collection descends from the city's earlier civic museum, whose core the 2010 foundation enlarged and reinterpreted; part of the collections remains installed in the Salone Morelli of the town hall on the square outside, so the museum is in effect distributed across two sites. The curatorial direction belongs to the Centro di Cultura e Storia Amalfitana, the study centre that has guarded the republic's historiography for decades. The Arsenal was restored in stages in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the museum formed part of its renewed cultural use. The date range the museum gives for the republic — 839, the traditional date of Amalfi's assertion of autonomy, to 1139, the year before the Norman conquest — follows the convention of Amalfitan historiography and is worth keeping in mind as a framework rather than a claim of precise statehood.