Il Museo Nazionale Archeologico di Taranto is among the most important in Italy and was established in 1887. The Museum has occupied since its origins the former Convent of the Alcantarine Friars, built in the mid-18th century and, following enlargement interventions in the mid-20th century, the adjacent northern body of the Ceschi Wing. Since 1998, renovation works began which led to the partial reopening of the Museum to the public on December 21, 2007.
Since December 22, 2013, the new exhibition sections of the Museum dedicated to the Roman city, the late antique and early medieval city up to the Byzantine refoundation of the 11th century AD have been reopened to the public.
In addition to the already visitable spaces, all supplemented with the exhibition of new finds (funerary monuments, figured vases, mosaics, painted plasters, furnishings), new rooms will be accessible dedicated to the rich documentation of Taranto’s productions and imports of the Roman age, the varied grave goods of the city’s necropolis, starting from the conquest of Q. Fabio Massimo in 209 BC up to the 3rd century AD. The display cases highlight beautiful goldsmith’s work, enriched with glass pastes and colored stones, polychrome terracottas still of Greek tradition, bones, ivories, and above all colored glass imports that characterize the incineration tombs of the imperial age, up to fragments of exceptional elegance of a marble sarcophagus with a scene of attack on ships.
The section dedicated to the city from late antiquity to the Byzantine age offers extensive documentation of mosaic floors of public and private buildings, with polychrome geometric and figurative motifs and materials from recent stratigraphic excavations (Villa Peripato, Palazzo delli Ponti, Cathedral of S. Cataldo) that have provided relevant data for the reconstruction of the ancient center in these chronological phases. In the last room there are also funerary epitaphs of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, documenting the presence in Taranto of peoples of different cultures and religions between the 4th and 11th centuries AD.
The section dedicated to the history of the Museum has been completely renewed, with the reconstruction of period settings from the time of Q. Quagliati and C. Drago and the exhibition of acquisitions and donations received by the Museum from the late 19th century to today, with figured vases of import and local production, stolen from archaeological sites in the Apulian territory, which ended up in foreign museums and today returned to public enjoyment in the MARTA.
A new exhibition design has also been reserved for paintings donated by Monsignor Ricciardi to the Museum in the early 20th century, in a mezzanine space overlooking Room IX.
Information on the National Archaeological Museum of Taranto
Via Cavour, 10
74100 Taranto (Taranto)
0994532112
museoarch.taranto@beniculturali.it
Source: MIBACT
