Museo Lapidario di Todi

In a deconsecrated church beside Todi's bishop's palace, the Lapidary Museum preserves Roman sarcophagi, a marble sundial, an inscription bearing the SATOR magic square, and papal coats of arms once fixed to Palazzo dei Priori.

Why it matters

The Museo Lapidario brings together carved and inscribed stones from Todi's history. The collection's origins reach back to the early sixteenth century, and its home is the former church of San Giovanni Battista, with two adjoining rooms of the monastery complex known as the Lucrezie. The exhibition is arranged in Roman and medieval-modern sections, presenting objects from different periods of the city.

What to notice

The Roman section includes funerary monuments with Doric friezes, marble altars, cinerary urns and tombstones. A white-marble funerary altar recovered from San Giovanni d'Acquaviva was reused as a holy-water font; another altar from San Damiano dates to the second half of the first century AD. Other works include a marble sundial from Ponte Rio dated to the first or second century, a strigillated sarcophagus with lion protomes, and a fourth-century Good Shepherd sarcophagus found beneath today's Piazza Garibaldi. The medieval and modern section includes a sculpture of San Giovanni Battista attributed to a sculptor in Andrea Bregno's circle, a polychrome marble bust of the Saviour from a Florentine workshop, a 1248 inscription commemorating work on Pontecuti bridge, and the SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS square. Three travertine coats of arms—those of Pope Julius III, Cardinal Giulio Montefeltro della Rovere and Bishop Luigi Ardinghelli—were removed from Palazzo dei Priori's facade in 1798 by local Jacobins of the Roman Republic.

Context and history

In 1425, Lucrezia della Genga left a house by the walls to a community of sisters. The complex grew through purchases into a monastery associated with the Franciscan Third Order, later known from its founder as the Lucrezie. It declined amid the religious orders' economic troubles, landslides around 1760 and the 1862 suppression of religious corporations. After the First World War the municipal property served various uses. Recovery began under a 1987 special law for consolidating the unstable hillsides of Orvieto and Todi. The lapidary collection moved to the current exhibition space in 2008; the Comune dates the museum's present layout to 2009. Its route presents stones from the Roman period through the nineteenth century.