Museo Civico e Pinacoteca di Todi

Under the beamed top floors of two medieval palaces on Piazza del Popolo, Todi keeps the whole story of itself: Attic vases and votive bronzes, nearly fifteen hundred coins, domestic ceramics, textiles, and a great altarpiece by the painter known as lo Spagna.

Why it matters

Todi's civic museum occupies upper floors of the Palazzo del Podestà and Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo, two communal palaces joined by a seventeenth-century bridge on the eastern side of the main square. Founded in 1871 and reorganised for its present display in 1997, the museum is among Umbria's older civic institutions. Its collections cover the city's history, archaeology, coins, textiles, ceramics and paintings, from pre-Roman trade to Counter-Reformation Rome.

What to notice

The archaeological section holds Attic ceramics in red and black figure, domestic objects and women's ornaments, and a group of small votive bronzes that document the trade between Todi and nearby Volsinii, today's Orvieto. The numismatic collection is the statistical surprise: 1,475 coins spanning pre-Roman to modern times, of which 130 were struck by Todi's own mint, the zecca of Tuder — money small enough to hold and local enough to prove the town once issued its own authority. The ceramics hall gathers everyday pottery of the eighth to eighteenth centuries beneath portraits of Todi's illustrious men, a fresco of the city and its territory by Pietro Paolo Sensini, and a painting of the city's founding legend by Ignazio Mei of Fabriano. The picture gallery centres on the large altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin by Giovanni di Pietro, called lo Spagna, one of Perugino's most important pupils, and continues with seventeenth-century canvases that trace the town's ties to Rome.

Context and history

The museum opened in 1871, in the optimistic first decades after Umbria joined the Kingdom of Italy, when communes across the region were gathering their scattered heritage into civic collections. Its first home was the Sala del Capitano, the hall now used as the town council chamber, and the collection stayed there until the reorganization of the twentieth century's end. The Ministry of Culture's own record, written for the museum under its earlier name of Museo Archeologico e Pinacoteca comunale, fixes the architecture: the Podestà palace begun in 1213 on models from the northern communes, the Capitano palace of 1293 with work continuing past 1301, and the seventeenth-century overhead passage joining them. One painting in the gallery is itself an immigrant from the town's religious history — the lo Spagna altarpiece stood over the altar of the Montesanto convent on the hill west of town until the Napoleonic suppressions emptied it.