Museo e Pinacoteca Diocesani di Imola

Facing Imola's cathedral, inside a bishop's palace begun in 1187, the Diocesan Museum and Pinacoteca gather more than 2,000 works of sacred art from the ninth century to the present — paintings, vestments, illuminated choirs, coins and carriages — in the state rooms of a residence remodelled by popes.

Why it matters

The Museo e Pinacoteca Diocesani occupy the piano nobile of the Palazzo Vescovile, the bishop's palace raised alongside the cathedral from 1187 and enlarged over seven centuries of episcopal patronage. The museum was established in 1962 to conserve furnishings rescued from churches damaged in the Second World War and collections saved by don Antonio Meluzzi after the bombing. It is among Italy's earliest diocesan museums, founded after the one in Bergamo. Its roughly 2,000 pieces, dated between the ninth and the twenty-first century, make it the essential complement to the cathedral facing it: what San Cassiano's church suggests about Imola's religious life, the museum documents object by object.

What to notice

The collections include paintings from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, sculpture, ceramics and goldwork. The restored apartments opened after 2000 display liturgical textiles from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, a numismatic series beginning in the ninth century, and contemporary sacred art, including a model for the Holy Door of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The ex-voto and terracotta groups are among the museum's notable collections. The palace also preserves Cosimo Morelli's neoclassical staircase and monumental salon built for Cardinal Gian Carlo Bandi from 1766, the gallery frescoed for Pope Pius VII — who had been bishop of Imola — by Antonio Villa and Angelo Gottarelli, and the second courtyard with the Museo delle Carrozze, where two eighteenth-century gala carriages that carried the Madonna del Piratello's image in bad weather stand under the loggia of a garden court.

Context and history

The palace grew with the diocese. Begun in 1187 together with the new cathedral consecrated in 1271, it was enlarged in 1452 and 1511, gained its north-west wing after 1518 and its south wing after 1585, and took much of its present shape under Cardinal Bandi, who from 1766 commissioned Cosimo Morelli's staircase, atrium and salone d'onore. Cardinal Stefano Donghi had already added a late seventeenth-century wing for illustrious guests, and Cardinal Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti — the future Pius IX — completed the solemn facade in 1845. The museum opened on the piano nobile in 1962, was rearranged and reopened in 1992, and expanded after 2000 into the recovered rooms of the green apartment, which brought textiles, coins and contemporary work into the circuit. The Archivio Storico Diocesano, holding documents from the fifteenth century, shares the courtyard ranges with the carriage museum and the historic garden.