The Diocesan Museum «Monsignor Aurelio Sorrentino» of Reggio Calabria is located within the city's archiepiscopal complex, together with the diocesan library and historical archive.
What to see
The museum was established on 25 January 1957 at the will of Monsignor Giovanni Ferro, but received new momentum during the episcopate of Monsignor Aurelio Sorrentino, who in 1988, on the occasion of the 21st National Eucharistic Congress, staged the exhibition «Figurazioni del sacro» in the rooms destined to become the permanent display; the present museum, the result of a regional museographic project launched with the programme agreement of 2003, was inaugurated on 7 October 2010. The building that houses it is what remains of the wing of the archiepiscopal palace built at the end of the 18th century on the ruins of an earlier structure, which had risen beside the cathedral at the end of the 16th century.
The collection, precious and highly representative of Reggio's religious heritage, includes silverware from Messina and Naples workshops, a group of liturgical textiles from Calabrian, Sicilian, Venetian and French manufacture, a collection of paintings, and 18th-century stone fragments from the altars of the old cathedral of Maria Santissima Assunta, destroyed by the earthquake of 1908; the sacred silverware in particular documents the wealth of the city's old confraternities, such as that of the Blessed Sacrament in the Cathedral.
Visiting
The museum is open to the public, with hours and visiting arrangements available on the official website.
Our editors' tip
Look closely at the 18th-century stone fragments: they are among the few surviving traces of the old cathedral destroyed by the earthquake, and give a sense of what it looked like before the disaster of 1908.
