Museo Civico del Sigillo

Hidden in plain sight beside the Amedeo Lia Museum, the Museo del Sigillo turns some 1,500 wax seals into a miniature archive of power, correspondence and image-making across five centuries of European history and diplomacy.

Why it matters

Sphragistics — the study of seals — barely registers on most museum itineraries, and that is precisely what makes this civic institution unusual. The museum opened in 2000 to house the collection donated by Lilian and Euro Capellini, assembled through more than thirty years of research and described by the civic museum service as one of the most complete private seal collections. Seals were the signatures of the pre-modern world: they authenticated documents, projected dynastic imagery and travelled with letters across borders, and a single matrix could carry more political meaning than pages of text. The collection comprises about 1,500 specimens. The museum also records collaborations with the Vatican Secret Archive, the Archive of the Forbidden City in Beijing and the Maison Lalique in Paris.

What to notice

The collection spans medieval matrices to modern sealing practices, displaying both carved matrices and the wax impressions they produced. In 2013 the Fiocchi family donated sixty-one examples, alongside matrices from the Maulella printing collection, extending the collection’s coverage of seal and print culture. The collection is housed in the Palazzina delle Arti. The Palazzina delle Arti rose partly on the garden of the seventeenth-century Paolotti convent and was extended in the early twentieth century in a neo-medieval taste — Gothic and Romanesque quotations that the civic museum service links to the architect Franco Oliva, a leading figure of that current in La Spezia. A steel-and-glass gallery connects the palazzina directly to the Amedeo Lia Museum next door.

Context and history

The museum opened in 2000 in the restored Palazzina delle Arti, which also houses the art and archaeology library. Lilian and Euro Capellini spent more than thirty years assembling the collection. It has grown through subsequent family gifts, including the 2013 Fiocchi donation. Within La Spezia’s civic museum network, the seal collection complements nearby holdings of archaeology, painting and ethnography with objects that document administrative and diplomatic culture.