Art & Museums | Italia Magnifica

Worth your time

Uffizi Gallery
Florence's great museum of Western painting, where the Medici collection turns the Renaissance into a room by room encounter.
Bargello National Museum
Florence's oldest public palace turned first national sculpture museum, home to Donatello's bronze David.
Capitoline Museums
The world's first public museum, on the star-paved piazza Michelangelo designed for Rome.

Places to see

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Galleria Borghese
A villa gallery in Villa Borghese park, with Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, six Caravaggios in Room VIII, and Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte.
Gallerie dell'Accademia
The full arc of Venetian painting, from Bellini to Veronese, in a former convent on the Grand Canal.
Egyptian Museum
Opened to the public in 1832 after a royal acquisition in 1824, Turin’s Museo Egizio brings together Kha and Merit’s burial goods, monumental Karnak statuary and the Nubian Temple of Ellesiya.
Naples National Archaeological Museum
Naples's museum of Pompeii and Herculaneum finds, the Farnese Marbles, and the Alexander Mosaic.
Pinacoteca di Brera
Milan's great picture gallery, built from Napoleon's confiscated altarpieces, from Piero to Hayez.
Certosa di San Martino
Naples' fourteenth-century Carthusian monastery turned museum, famous for its presepe collection and city views.
Malatestiana Library
Europe's first civic library, its 1454 reading room, furniture, and chained codices all intact.
Sansevero Chapel
The di Sangro chapel, home of Sanmartino's Veiled Christ and the Anatomical Machines.
Scuola Grande di San Rocco
A Venetian confraternity’s surviving headquarters, with more than sixty paintings still in their original setting.
Museo Ferrari
Ferrari's museum at Maranello, near the factory: road and racing cars, F1 winners and driving simulators.
Aquarium of Genoa
Renzo Piano’s port-front aquarium, with 400 species from sharks and seals to penguins and dolphins.
Bagatti Valsecchi Museum
A Renaissance-style palazzo museum near Montenapoleone, furnished with genuine 15th and 16th-century art.
MART Rovereto
Rovereto's domed museum of Futurism and the Italian moderns.
Murano Glass Museum
Murano's treasury of seven centuries of Venetian glassmaking.
South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology
Bolzano's museum of Otzi, the Iceman and all he carried.
National Museum of Magna Graecia
Home to the Riace Bronzes, two Greek warrior statues pulled from the sea off Calabria in 1972.
Museo Enzo Ferrari
The yellow car-hood pavilion built around Enzo Ferrari's birthplace in Modena.
Violin Museum
Cremona's temple to Stradivari and Amati violins, still played to keep their sound alive.
Wine Museum of Torgiano
A private wine museum in a 17th-century palace, with Etruscan vessels and Picasso prints.
Galleria d'Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi
Piacenza’s modern art gallery, home to Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady, stolen in 1997 and found in 2019.
Juliet's House
A medieval tower-house documented as an inn by 1351, later adopted as Juliet’s literary home and refashioned in 1939–1940; its famous balcony combines reused fourteenth-century stone with twentieth-century staging.
National Archaeological Museum of Taranto
MArTA's Gold of Taranto: Greek jewelry unmatched since, in a museum spanning Magna Graecia to Rome.
Aosta Megalithic Area
Aosta's MegaMuseo, built over a Neolithic ritual landscape of carved stelae used for six thousand years.
International Museum of Ceramics
Faenza's ceramics museum, the world's deepest maiolica collection, with pieces donated by Picasso and Chagall.
MUSE Science Museum
MUSE, Renzo Piano's mountain-shaped science museum in Trento, descending from glaciers to rainforest.
Museum of Mediterranean Masks
Mamoiada's mask museum, tracing the Mamuthones and Issohadores of Barbagia's carnival within a Mediterranean context.
National Archaeological Museum of Abruzzo
Chieti's museum of the Warrior of Capestrano, a 6th-century BC disk-hatted Picene funerary statue.
Birthplace of Gabriele d'Annunzio
The Pescara townhouse where d'Annunzio was born in 1863, a survivor among the 1943 ruins.
Paleolithic Museum of Isernia
The roofed 600,000-year-old dig where Italy's earliest known humans left their butchering floor.
WiMu Wine Museum
Barolo's wine museum in the Falletti castle, where the modern wine itself was invented.
Misteri Museum
The hangar of Campobasso's 1748 flying-machine floats, used each June in the Misteri procession.