Museo regionale di Messina (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.

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

Origins

The first nucleus for the museum's collection came with various private collections of conservative taste. First opened in 1806 as the Museo civico peloritano by the Reale Accademia Peloritana "to end the despoliation of art", its formation was the idea of its first director Carmelo La Farina. It housed the Alojsio, Arenaprimo, Ciancialo, Grosso-Cacopardo and Carmisino family collections as well as a collection of 14th- to 18th-century paintings owned by the city's senate, which also part-funded its running costs.
It was initially based on via Rovere, near the Archivio degli atti notarili, before being moved to former university buildings, then (after its massive expansion from the collections of religious corporations suppressed by the 1866 liquidation laws) in 1884 to a building on via Peculio Frumentario and from 1891 to 1908 to the former monastery of San Gregorio.

The site of the former monastery

In the rooms of the former monastery, following acquisitions and hereditary legacies, a copious amount of heterogeneous materials were formed and sedimented: in addition to the movables and objects of cultural use, coming from the ecclesiastical heritage, and the oil paintings from various eras and schools, also a rich numismatic collection, typologically classified into Mamertine, Greek and Roman Republican coins from the 2nd to the 1st century, mostly coming from the collection of Grosso-Cacopardo and his heirs purchased and donated to the Museum by the Municipality of Messina.
Also noteworthy are: the collection of seventy-four enamelled maiolica vases with reliefs – made between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the following century, by the factories of Urbino, Casteldurante and Faenza – coming from the pharmacy of the civic hospital of…