Museo Civico “Giuseppe Barone”

Few museums in Italy survive exactly as their founder arranged them. In Baranello, on the upper floor of the former town hall, the Civic Museum "Giuseppe Barone" keeps an architect's 1897 bequest in its original display cases and original order — Attic and Italiot vases, an Egyptian canopic jar, Neapolitan and Flemish paintings — a nineteenth-century collection arrived whole into the twenty-first.

Why it matters

The museum's distinction is not size but integrity. When the Baranello architect Giuseppe Barone donated his collection to the commune on 10 October 1897, he gave his town a typical product of nineteenth-century collecting: antiquities classified by type and form, paintings arranged by school, curiosities gathered from the ancient Mediterranean and beyond. Almost uniquely — the collection is rare among Italian nineteenth-century holdings for having survived intact — nothing was dispersed or rearranged. The vitrines, the disposition of the pieces and the criteria of display remain those of the 1800s. The museum therefore preserves both a corpus of genuine Greek, Italiot, Etruscan and Egyptian material, and a living portrait of how one provincial intellectual wanted the past to be understood.

What to notice

• The museum occupies the second floor of the former Palazzo Comunale, restructured at the end of the nineteenth century by Barone, who gave the facade its classicising mullioned windows and a fine white marble sundial.
• Two exhibition rooms, connected to the entrance staircase, retain the original teche — the founder's display cases.
• The first room includes Neapolitan-school wall paintings attributed to Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Flemish pictures including the well-known "Mangiatore di Prosciutto", an Egyptian canopic vase that still contains mummified remains, Italic pottery with geometric decoration, and sixth-century BC Attic black- and red-figure vases.
• The Greek and Italiot ceramic corpus of the first room, a group of more than 120 pieces described as unique in Molise.
• The second room's Etruscan material — vases, bronzes, kitchen utensils, mirrors and jewellery — together with porcelain from the Capodimonte and Pescolanciano factories and, true to the taste of nineteenth-century collections, Chinese, Japanese and Indian works.

Context and history

Giuseppe Barone was Baranello's great nineteenth-century patron-builder: the museum's historical notes credit him with the 1890 enlargement and bell tower of the church of the Beata Vergine del Rosario , the monumental fountain of the goddess Cerere, and the refacing of the ancient town hall in the Florentine manner of the Risorgimento palazzi. The culmination of his career, in the museum's own telling, was the collection itself — antiquities including material from the necropolis of Cuma and from Pompeii, Italiot, Attic and Corinthian vases, Peruvian vases, medieval bronzes, ceramics from around the world, and paintings of the Neapolitan and Flemish schools — which he donated to the commune and the people of Baranello in 1897.

The donation was conceived as a civil act, converting a private Wunderkammer into public patrimony for the edification of the town, and the layout Barone designed — typological, didactic, rational in the nineteenth-century manner — has been deliberately preserved through subsequent restorations. The museum preserves Barone's collection and its nineteenth-century arrangement.