Museo Lapidario di Ferrara

The Museo Lapidario occupies the deconsecrated church of Santa Libera and preserves Ferrara's collection of ancient stone: Roman stelae, funerary altars and sarcophagi gathered by the city since 1735.

Why it matters

Ferrara is a medieval and Renaissance city, so its Roman past survives mainly in moved stone — and this small museum is where that past stays legible. The collection began in 1735 with a single donation and grew through the gifts of local scholars into the main documentary record of Roman presence in the delta lands. Santa Libera itself, built between 1470 and 1474, then an oratory, a warehouse, a stable and a workshop, was restored in 1979 precisely to house the collection.

What to notice

• The stele of the physician Pupius, of the first century AD, honouring a freedman attached to the imperial cult, and the large sarcophagus of the Aurelii, of the third century, unearthed in 1713 at the Voghenza archaeological site.
• The stele of the Caesii, the sarcophagus of Neon, the stele of Trebius Anteros, and carved details of the dextrarum iunctio, the joined-hands gesture of marriage.
• The funerary craftsmanship itself, showing Venetian and Ravennate stylistic influences on local workshops.
• The building: an Augustinian oratory of 1470-1474 by Antonio Angelici, later the hall of the masons' guild, its walls now the backdrop for epigraphs and reliefs.

Context and history

The museum's foundation has a precise date: in 1735 marchese Ercole Bevilacqua gave the city a Roman stele of local provenance to mark his re-election as Giudice dei Savi. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the collection expanded with donations from scholars such as Girolamo Baruffaldi and Giuseppe Antenore Scalabrini, and with marbles recovered from local churches. Housed since its 1979 restoration in Santa Libera, secularised after the French invasion of 1796, the museum is now administered together with Palazzo Schifanoia, which faces it across the street.