Museo Civico Medievale

Bologna's university Middle Ages, stripped from church walls and city facades, are reassembled inside a Renaissance palazzo on Via Manzoni. The Medieval Civic Museum holds the gilded pope who ended a war, the tombs of the jurists who taught Europe law, and a lapidary of tombstones lifted from the city's stones.

Why it matters

This is the museum of Bologna between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, the age when its lawyers taught half of Europe and its guilds built the towers. Opened in 1985 inside Palazzo Ghisilardi, it gathers the sculptures, inscriptions and objects that were too exposed or too fragile to survive in situ, from early medieval goldwork to the bronze of the greatest Baroque sculptors. Many coats of arms and tomb arks embedded in the city's public buildings originated in this medieval civic world.

What to notice

The collection includes Boniface VIII's 1301 statue in gilded copper sheets, made to mark the pope's role in settling the war between Bologna and Ferrara. Funerary monuments of the university's jurists include Giovanni d'Andrea's ark, moved from San Domenico. A bronze aquamanile in the form of a knight, cast in the Rhineland, documents later-thirteenth-century armour. Renaissance and Baroque bronzes include Giambologna's model for the Neptune fountain, Alessandro Algardi's Saint Michael and Bernini's bust of Pope Gregorio XV Ludovisi. The lapidary in the former stables contains inscriptions and stone coats of arms rescued from churches, gates and demolished buildings, including the early funerary inscription of Martino the ostiary.

Context and history

Palazzo Ghisilardi was raised between 1484 and 1491 for the notary Bartolomeo Ghisilardi and is judged the finest Quattrocento family palace in Bologna after Palazzo Bevilacqua; the courtyard gallery rests on stone corbels carved with foliage, the family's arms and the founder's initials. Its later life ran through the city's darkest twentieth-century episode: from 1923 the building housed one of Italy's earliest Fascist headquarters, and a notorious 1929 dinner held in its restaurant is remembered as the night Enzo Ferrari and his partners resolved to found Scuderia Ferrari.

The museum itself arrived in 1985, when the city moved its medieval holdings into the palace, joining sculpture, applied arts and the lapidary that had previously been arranged in the courtyard of Palazzo Galvani. The lapidary keeps the memory of urban change: inscriptions for the dead, plaques once fixed into the city walls, heraldic stones from demolished houses, all collected as churches and monuments were restored or torn down. Together with the Archaeological Museum and the applied-arts collections, it belongs to the civic museum network. Its arms galleries include pieces associated with Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, the collector-scholar behind Bologna's scientific institutions.