d’Accursio: Collezioni Comunali d’Arte

The last part of our sightseeing today took us to the museum where the Municipal Art Collections are exhibited.

Normally, there is a €5pp admission for this art museum, but it was included with our €7pp ticket for the clock tower. The voucher we received was good for six months, so we could have returned another day, but we felt it was best to do it today.

The collections are housed in the former winter apartment used by the papal cardinal legates who lived at the palazzo. It consisted of a maze of rooms filled with paintings, statues, porcelains, laces, religious artifacts, and furnishings. The rooms themselves were art in and of themselves … the frescoes adorning the walls and the ceilings drawing my eye perhaps even more than the art itself.

One room — the Sala Urbana … named for the ruling Pope (Urbano VIII Barberini) at the time Cardinal Spada ordered the construction of the room — is filled with fresco depictions of the 188 coats of arms of the legate cardinals, governors, and other administrators of the Papal State between 1327 and 1744.

I later read a description of the museum on the Bologna Welcome website that I thought was perfect — “… The collections, in fact, make up a ‘furnished museum’ with halls maintaining the original decorations where furniture is the protagonist intact.”

Long story short, Mui and I each went our own way … exploring the rooms at our own pace. There were other visitors at the museum. But rarely more than two or three at a time in any given room … and often wandering through at a much faster pace than I was.

We left the museum after about 1.5 hours of wandering the many interconnected rooms. Our feet weary, we headed back to the AirBNB for a meal of leftovers and a quiet evening.Read more