Museo Capitolare (Museo Diocesano di Arte Sacra)

Beside Gravina in Puglia's cathedral, the Museo Capitolare presents objects from the city's religious and civic history. Its four rooms hold embroidered vestments, silver liturgical objects, paintings and documents, including garments associated with Pope Benedict XIII and a charter dated 1091.

Why it matters

Opened in 2000, the museum preserves objects accumulated by the Capitolo Cattedrale over centuries. It is housed in the seventeenth-century Palazzo del Seminario on Piazza Benedetto XIII and forms part of the Museo Diffuso, a network that includes the cathedral, the Soccorpo church, the bell tower, the Finia library and two rock churches.

What to notice

The Sala dei Paramenti displays embroidered vestments, including those of Benedict XIII, the Gravina-born Orsini pope. The Sala degli Argenti contains chalices and reliquaries from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, among them an effigy of San Filippo Neri and a stauroteca carried in the Good Friday procession of the Holy Wood. A further room brings together paintings and documents, including the 1091 charter issued by Norman count Umfrido d'Altavilla, canvases by Francesco Fracanzano and Cavalier d'Arpino, and a processional cross. Finds from the sanctuary of Madonna della Stella connect the collection to the landscape beyond the city.

Context and history

The museum gives a public home to objects once kept in the cathedral's sacristies: vestments used in liturgy, silver carried in processions and documents that anchor Gravina's history. Its location in the former seminary palace keeps the collection close to the cathedral and the institutional life from which many of its objects came.