What to see · Imola

More places of interest

• Museo di San Domenico

  The Museo San Domenico is a museum complex in the former thirteenth-century Dominican convent, in the historic centre of Imola. It houses the city's art collections, with more than six hundred works from the fourteenth century to today, and the Giuseppe Scarabelli natural history museum.

  What to see

  The convent was the seat of the Dominicans until 1797, when it was turned into a barracks for the Napoleonic army. In the nineteen-seventies reconstruction began, with the intention of housing the civic museums: the picture gallery opened in 1988, in 2005 it was joined by the natural history and archaeological section of the Museo Scarabelli and in 2011 the museum was enlarged further. The art collections occupy the great dormitory of the former convent, the corridor around one of the cloisters and the rooms of the old convent library; the route is divided into seven sections, from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century frescoes taken from the city's walls and ceramics from archaeological excavations to contemporary art, and since 2023 it includes the donation of six ceramic works by the studio of Bertozzi & Casoni, Imola ceramists of international standing.

  The Scarabelli Collection, formerly the Gabinetto di Storia Naturale founded in 1857 by Giuseppe Scarabelli, Odoardo Pirazzoli, Giuseppe Liverani and Giacomo Tassinari in the former convent of San Francesco, was in effect the city's first public museum; it has been in this location since 2013 and houses finds of prehistoric archaeology, fossils, rocks and minerals, as well as ethnographic and natural history material from the Imola area. In 2021 an archaeological recovery project on the convent site brought to light a Roman domus, the Domus del Rasoio, so called from a bronze razor with a panther-head handle: an open excavation, not yet open to the public, with three mosaic-paved rooms of a rich domus of the first century BC and the remains of a fifteenth-century workshop for casting the bells of the church of San Nicolò e Domenico.

  Visiting

  The museum is in the former convent, in the historic centre of Imola, and is part of the Imola Musei network with Palazzo Tozzoni and the collections of the Rocca sforzesca. Temporary exhibitions are held there. The sources consulted give no hours or fees: check them; the new archaeological museum of the Domus del Rasoio was being set up.

  Our editors' tip

  The recovery has made the convent's first cloister usable again, giving the 32 Corinthian columns back their load-bearing function.

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