The Museo Pio IX is the diocesan museum of Imola, inaugurated on 27 May 1962 and the second Italian ecclesiastical museum by foundation after the diocesan museum of Bergamo.
What to see
Its originator was Monsignor Antonio Meluzzi, who in the first years after the Second World War went to the most damaged churches and presbyteries to secure paintings and furnishings, and who was the museum's first director. The rooms are in the Bishop's Palace (twelfth to eighteenth century), which on the piano nobile keeps the apartments where the future popes Pius VII and Pius IX lived as bishops of Imola, with the decorations and furnishings of the time; the paintings found a place in the apartments of Pius IX, in the «red apartment», the salone d'onore and the gallery, with the original terracotta floor. Renewed, the museum reopened in April 1992; between 2000 and 2016 it was enlarged with the six rooms of the «green apartment» (liturgical textiles, the numismatic and philatelic collection, contemporary sacred art and, from 2012, devotional terracottas) and in 2018 with the palace's second courtyard, where two sumptuous eighteenth-century gala coaches are displayed, one of which until the mid twentieth century carried the image of the Beata Vergine del Piratello for the rogations, and nine liveries of the Neoclassical period.
Since 2020 the museum has extended over seventeen rooms, about a thousand square metres, with more than two thousand pieces dated between the ninth and twenty-first centuries. Among the works are nineteen fourteenth-century illuminated choir books by Niccolò di Giacomo and Fra Giovanni da Ferrara; the reliquary of the Virgin's veil, of 1378; the Madonna di Mazzolano, attributed to Lorenzo or Paolo Veneziano; the reliquary of San Sigismondo, of 1382; a Madonna and Child with saints of 1516 by Innocenzo da Imola, with paintings by Bernardino da Tossignano and Guidaccio da Imola; and a restored Traeri organ of 1671 from the church of Santa Maria della Pianta. In the room of modern sacred art are paintings by Anacleto Margotti and a life-size terracotta model of the Holy Door of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome by Luigi Enzo Mattei.
Visiting
The museum is in the Bishop's Palace of Imola, on the piano nobile. The sources consulted give no hours or fees: check them; they mention a dedicated official website.
Our editors' tip
The two eighteenth-century coaches in the second courtyard were donated by Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti, bishop of Imola from 1785 to 1816 and then Pope Pius VII: you will find them in the palace courtyard, not in the rooms.
