Museo Civico 'Emanuele Barba'

The Emanuele Barba Civic Museum grew from a canon's donated books into a collection of shells, fossils, Messapian ceramics, weapons and paintings. It occupies a nineteenth-century palace in Gallipoli's old town.

Why it matters

The museum's collections bring together the natural history of the Ionian coast, archaeology of the Messapian Salento and works by local painters. Its development began with a public library and continued under Emanuele Barba, whose zoological cabinet shaped the natural-science collection.

What to notice

The natural-science holdings include shells gathered from around the world, a collection devoted to marine life, local fish and bird specimens, fossils and minerals. The archaeological section includes inscribed Messapian vases, finds linked to the necropolis of Alezio, coins and portraits. The museum also holds works by Giovanni Andrea Coppola, the seventeenth-century Gallipoli painter, and a pathology section reflecting Barba's medical studies. Weapons, costumes and decorative objects complete the civic collections.

Context and history

The institution's origin dates to 1823, when the canon Carmine Fontò opened his books — about three thousand volumes — to the public; further donations followed from the suppressed Dominican and Franciscan houses. In the years that followed, responsibility for the collections passed to Emanuele Barba, the Gallipoli intellectual whose combination of medicine, philosophy and natural history gave the museum its character and its name; the Ministry of Culture's entry credits him with instituting the zoological cabinet. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the collections grew into a general museum of the city — antiquarian, naturalist and artistic at once — and in 1987 part of the book heritage moved to the dedicated premises of the municipal library in Via Sant'Angelo, while many volumes remained with the museum.