Regional Museum of Messina

The building housing the museum was originally the Barbera-Mellinghoff spinning-mill, a late 19th-century construction chosen after the great earthquake of 1908 to be the site of the future museum, which was refurbished and finally opened in 1922. Over the years the building has been considerably restructured in order to guarantee the exhibits the best possible conditions for their preservation; the last major work was carried out in the 1980s. A new large complex of buildings near the present site was completed in 2010s.

The original collections came from the Museo Civico. After the earthquake in 1908 these were expanded by the addition of paintings, sculptures and precious decorative works from damaged or destroyed buildings, thus creating a collection of paintings and sculptures by internationally known and local artists, together with a variety of other objets d'art.

The museum was organized on historicistic principles: each area contains the most important works of the same period, regardless of their typological class.[1]

• Rooms 1-2 works of the Norman-Swabian period
• Rooms 3-4 sculptures and paintings of the 15th and 16th century
• Room 4 "Saint Gregory Polyptych" by Antonello da Messina
• Rooms 5-8 Paintings, sculptures, funerary monuments and works of decorative art of the 16th century
• Room 6 "Scylla" by G. A. Montorsoli
• Rooms 9-11 17th-century art and culture
• Room 10 Caravaggio works
• Room 12 18th-century art and culture in Messina
• Room 13 "The treasury" silversmithry, cribs, church ornaments, pottery[2]