Musei Civici di Palazzo Buonaccorsi

Macerata's civic museums occupy an eighteenth-century aristocratic palace whose painted apartment retells Virgil's Aeneid room by room. Around that Baroque core, the city has gathered old-master paintings, a museum of historic carriages and a collection of twentieth-century Italian art, all under one noble roof.

Why it matters

Palazzo Buonaccorsi is both the finest private palace of old Macerata and the container of everything the city has collected. Its piano nobile carries one of the most complete ensembles of late Baroque decoration in central Italy, planned as an anthology of eighteenth-century painting with artists summoned from Venice, Bologna, Rome and Naples. Into the same building the municipality later moved the civic pinacoteca — Crivelli, Sassoferrato, Maratta — a museum of carriages unique in the region and a modern collection strong in Futurism. The palace brings together collections spanning several centuries.

What to notice

• The Galleria dell'Eneide, the palace's great painted apartment: a vault with the Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne and, along the walls, canvases of the Stories of Aeneas after Virgil, wrapped in allegories of the months and zodiac signs painted on doors and shutters.
• The named rooms of the noble floor — the Room of Romulus and Remus, the Room of Bacchus, the Room of Hercules — each with its own mythological programme; the gallery project was begun by Simone Buonaccorsi and carried on by his son Raimondo.
• The private chapel, its vault frescoed by Niccolò Ricciolini, with an altarpiece by Carlo Antonio Rambaldi.
• In the pinacoteca: Carlo Crivelli, Giovanni di Corraduccio, Carlo Dolci, Alessandro Turchi and Carlo Maratta, alongside Flemish, Venetian and Neapolitan pictures and portraits of Maceratese worthies — the collection seeded by the 1835 Borgetti donation and the 26 paintings given in 1860 by Antonio Bonfigli for a "pinacoteca patria".
• The Museo della Carrozza in the basement: twenty-four vehicles built around Count Pier Alberto Conti's 1962 donation of sporting carriages, with saddlery, harnesses and driving manuals, plus an eighteenth-century hand sedan chair.
• The Italian garden with its balustrade of ornamental vases by Antonio Perucci and three Istrian-stone statues of a victorious Hercules by Giovanni Bonazza.

Context and history

The Buonaccorsi family rose within a couple of generations: city patriciate in 1652, a county title for Simone Buonaccorsi from Pope Clement XI in 1701. Construction of their palace began in 1697, assembling older houses on a design by Giovan Battista Contini, the Roman architect trained in Bernini's orbit; Ludovico Gregorini completed the structure in 1718 with the inner courtyard and the garden. The fresco campaign of the Aeneid Gallery grew through the following decades until the apartment became the anthology of contemporary painting its owners intended.

The city bought the palace in 1967. It subsequently housed the local Academy of Fine Arts. After restoration, civic collections formerly kept in the Jesuit college, later the Biblioteca Mozzi Borgetti, were transferred here. The carriage museum opened in the basement in 2009, followed by the ancient and modern art sections in 2014. The modern collection traces local Futurism of the 1910s and 1920s, the interwar Gruppo Boccioni, the three national "Scipione" painting prizes of the 1950s and 1960s and the international networks of the Macerata artist Elverio Maurizi, with a full section devoted to the Macerata-born Futurist painter Ivo Pannaggi.