Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Canosa di Puglia (Palazzo Sinesi)

In a nineteenth-century palace in the centre of Canosa di Puglia, the state's archaeological museum keeps what no foreign museum could take: the complete funeral assemblages of the city's Daunian and Hellenistic aristocrats. Vases, armour and polychrome ceramics from the great chamber tombs of Canusium are shown together, tomb by tomb.

Why it matters

Canosa was one of the richest archaeological centres of ancient Daunia, and its funerary treasures were scattered across the world's museums over the centuries — the Ministry's museum pages note Canosan pieces in Taranto, Naples, London, Paris, Malibu and Moscow. Palazzo Sinesi is where the opposite argument is made: here the contents of individual tombs, above all the celebrated Ipogeo Varrese, are exhibited as coherent groups. Its collections provide context for the hypogea and necropoleis surrounding the city, including the painted tombs of the western belt.

What to notice

The Sala dell'Ariete contains geometrically decorated vases from tombs at Vico Pasubio and via Legnano, alongside ornaments, weapons and the belt pendant shaped like a ram that gives the room its name. The Sala dei Crateri is devoted to finds from the Ipogeo di Vico San Martino, where native geometric pottery is shown alongside figured red-figure vases from the Greek colonies. The core of the museum is the Varrese section: monumental Apulian red-figure vases with narrative scenes, a bronze anatomical cuirass of the mid-fourth century BC, and the polychrome and plastic vases characteristic of Canosan workshops, painted in tempera with applied decoration. The gallery also contains a red-figure phiale attributed to the circle of the Arpi Painter, around 315-300 BC, and the polychrome askos with winged horses from the fourth century's last decades.

Context and history

The museum occupies Palazzo Sinesi, a nineteenth-century building in the town centre that the Fondazione Archeologica Canosina, seated in the same palace, has made available for archaeological display since 1994; the state museum grew out of that collaboration. Its collections illustrate Canosan society and craftsmanship between the sixth and third centuries BC, drawing on the grave goods of archaic tombs and of the rich Hellenistic hypogea that surround the modern city. The palace has also hosted exhibitions on the history of the Tomba Varrese.