Antica Spezieria di San Giovanni

The Antica Spezieria preserves a Benedictine pharmacy first recorded in 1201. Its rooms display historic ceramic vessels, mortars and frescoed lunettes associated with monastic medicine.

Why it matters

The Antica Spezieria preserves a history of pharmacy within the Benedictine abbey of San Giovanni Evangelista. A pharmacy in the abbey appears in documents from 1201, while the monastery itself was founded in 980. The Benedictines prepared medicines first for their community and later for the public. The present furnishings date from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The State acquired the premises in 1896, and the rooms reopened in 1951 as a pharmacy museum.

What to notice

In the Sala del Fuoco, the Banco delle Consegne retains precision scales and the historic counter associated with prescriptions. The Sala dei Mortai has frescoed lunettes depicting Galen, Hippocrates, Aesculapius and Avicenna, above bronze and marble mortars. Other rooms preserve sixteenth- and seventeenth-century shelving and ceramic vessels from Emilia, Savona and Venice. A smaller room contains a well, stills and tools associated with preparing medicines.

Context and history

The building dates to around 981 according to the city account. Its structure changed over successive interventions before restoration returned parts of the earlier arrangement. In 1766 the Benedictines radically reordered the rooms and secularised the pharmacy amid pressure from Bourbon minister Guglielmo Du Tillot's campaign against the order. Eight rooms once composed the pharmacy; four monumental rooms survived into the modern museum. A major restoration completed in 2024 conserved the space and renewed the presentation.