The Museo Regionale Agostino Pepoli (English: Pepoli Regional Museum) is a museum of art and decorative arts in Trapani, Sicily. It is housed in the former 14th-century Carmelite monastery adjacent to the Basilica-santuario di Maria Santissima Annunziata.
The museum holds collections that reflect the artistic and cultural heritage of the region. Its scope and richness make it one of the principal cultural institutions in western Sicily, and the most important museum in Trapani.[1]
History
The museum originated between 1906 and 1908, when Agostino Sieri Pepoli—a Trapani nobleman, historian and collector—donated his private holdings of art, decorative objects and historical material to form a civic museum.[2]
The museum’s development drew on the earlier Pinacoteca Fardelliana, a civic picture gallery created in the 19th century from the art collection of Giovan Battista Fardella, a local nobleman. Left to the municipality together with its library and archives, the gallery provided a substantial core of paintings and established a precedent for integrating private collections into the civic museum.[2]
The museum opened to the public in 1914. Its first director, Antonino Sorrentino, supervised the initial arrangement of the collections and established cataloguing systems that shaped the museum’s early organisation.[2]
The museum is housed in the former convent of the Carmelite friars in the Borgo Annunziata district of Trapani, next to the Santuario dell’Annunziata. The sanctuary and convent developed outside the medieval city walls as a suburban pilgrimage site.[3][4][1]
Research on the adjoining Santuario dell'Annunziata has highlighted the architectural development of the combined church and convent, described as one of the most important religious centres in western Sicily. The complex displays a stratified fabric composed of a 14th-century core, substantial 16th-century renovations carried out under the priors Edigio Onesti and Cecilio Cavarretta, and an extensive late-Baroque rebuilding directed by Giovanni Amico between 1741 and 1763.[5]
The museum underwent several phases of reorganisation during the 20th century, culminating in a major restoration completed in 1965, which regularised its institutional status and adapted the historic convent to its role as a regional museum.[2]
The collection
The museum’s collections include a broad range of fine and decorative arts from the Middle Ages to the modern period. These comprise medieval, Renaissance and early modern painting and sculpture, alongside extensive holdings of Trapani coral, gold and silver work, for which the city is historically renowned.
Many works entered the museum between the late 19th and early 20th centuries through civic deposits, ecclesiastical suppressions and private donations, reflecting patterns of collecting and heritage protection in post-unification Sicily.[2]
A distinctive feature of the collections is the documentation of Trapani’s coral and silver craftsmanship, developed through the integration of historic workshops and family holdings illustrating the city’s artisanal traditions and their influence on local artistic production.[2]
Additional sections display maiolica and porcelain, ecclesiastical furnishings, sacred textiles, historic clothing and accessories, nativity scenes, Risorgimento memorabilia and a selection of archaeological material.[3]
The museum also hosts temporary exhibitions. These have included L’arte del corallo in Sicilia (1986), a major showing of coral art across Sicily,[6]Ori e argenti di Sicilia (1989), devoted to gold and silver arts,[6] and the 2008 international exhibition Caravaggio: L'immagine del divino, which presented 14 works attributed to Caravaggio.[7][8]
123456Palazzotto, Pierfrancesco (2012). "Dal collezionismo privato al museo: la metamorfosi della Pinacoteca Fardelliana e del Museo Pepoli a Trapani tra il XIX e il XX secolo". Itinerari d'arte in Sicilia (in Italian). Edizioni Graphiti. pp.264–275.
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