Museo del Libro - Casa della Cultura Palazzo Caputi

Ruvo di Puglia's Casa della Cultura occupies a noble residence begun in 1592, where golden rococo stuccoes, a columned loggia and a Roman epitaph now frame the civic book museum and the Pasquale Testini library.

Why it matters

The palace is notable both as architecture and as a cultural institution. As architecture, it is one of the defining noble residences of Ruvo's historic centre: a three-order facade in smooth ashlar begun in 1592 at the behest of Domenico Caputi, so close in design to the neighbouring Palazzo Avitaia that the municipality's heritage page points out the kinship. As an institution, it is the seat of the town's cultural administration of everyday life — the Casa della Cultura, hosting events and conferences, the Museo del Libro, and since 2016 the Biblioteca Comunale Pasquale Testini. Unlike the Jatta museum, Palazzo Caputi is a Renaissance palace repurposed as a book museum and lending library. Its atrium and loggia also hold the residues of the Caputi family's own lost antiquarian collection, which gives the building a second, quieter archaeological story.

What to notice

A large arched portal supporting the second-floor balcony leads to a rectangular atrium, partly covered by a barrel vault on lunettes ending in carved capitals. An open section of the atrium exposes a balustrade resting on decorative reliefs, and beyond it opens a wide loggia on elegant columns — the palace's most photogenic space. In the loggia, two details deserve attention: the entrance to the old family chapel, and a Roman funerary epitaph, probably a survivor of the Caputi collection of vases and coins from Ruvo's Magna Graecia era, a collection now dispersed. Look up in the atrium for the gilded stuccoes of rococo taste that the municipal description singles out. The facade itself, with its three stacked orders and smooth bugnato, rewards comparison with Palazzo Avitaia a short walk away — the two were built to a similar pattern, and seeing both explains how Ruvo's nobility chose to present itself at the end of the sixteenth century.

Context and history

Domenico Caputi commissioned the palace in 1592, in the generation after the Carafa had settled in as counts of Ruvo and the town had begun its long aristocratic refashioning. The complex grew by accretion: in 1792 a second Caputi palace was joined to the building, which is why the block reads as one grand residence today. The family's taste for antiquity — the vase and coin collection assembled from Ruvo's underground — eventually left the palace, dispersed like so much of the town's archaeology, but the Roman epitaph in the loggia keeps a trace of it in place. In the modern city the building changed from private residence to public institution: it now operates under the municipality's Casa della Cultura and museum-system office, and in 2016 the Biblioteca Comunale Pasquale Testini moved in alongside the Museo del Libro.