The Pinacoteca provinciale di Potenza is a painting and sculpture museum, founded in 2000 and housed in a building that began as a pavilion of the former provincial asylum.
What to see
The building is pavilion number 3, the one for the «semi-agitated» women patients, of the Ophelia Project, the complex conceived for the new provincial psychiatric hospital by the engineer Giuseppe Quaroni and the architect Marcello Piacentini, winners of a competition of ideas announced in 1905. The foundation stone was laid in 1907 and work began in 1910. The project envisaged a true health district of eighteen small pavilions of one or two storeys, in eclectic style, surrounded by gardens and avenues; because of high costs, the war and changes to the plan, not all the complex remained devoted to the asylum. Of the pavilions nine survive today, and this is the one that houses the Pinacoteca.
The rooms hold a permanent exhibition of sculpture and painting devoted to Concetto Valente, who directed the Museo provinciale from 1928 to 1954 and enriched its art collections. Nineteenth-century paintings and sculptures predominate; there are also, in smaller numbers, twentieth-century works.
Visiting
The Pinacoteca is in the Santa Maria district of Potenza, in the quarter of the former provincial asylum. The sources consulted give no opening hours, entrances or visiting arrangements: check them.
Our editors' tip
The name Ophelia was given to the project by its two designers, both Romans, inspired by Ophelia, the figure in Shakespeare's Hamlet who drowns after losing her reason.
