People come to Recanati for Leopardi, and end up looking at Lorenzo Lotto. This villa of the counts Colloredo Mels, medieval in origin and later remade into the neoclassical building of today, gathers four of his works: the Annunciation, the polyptych painted for the town, the Transfiguration and a Saint James. It is the group that makes the museum a compulsory stop in the Marche.
What to see
The picture gallery follows the order of the centuries. In the medieval part are panels of the late fourteenth century and detached frescoes; then the Renaissance room, with Lotto and with Vincenzo Pagani; then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with altarpieces brought in from the churches of the district. One section is given to a Recanati potter, with pieces that tell of the feasts and trades of the town.
On the archaeological floor are the finds of a prehistoric settlement dug just outside the town and those of the iron age. In the cellars of the villa, instead, is the museum of emigration from the Marche, devoted to those who left these hills for America and for Europe from the nineteenth century on.
Visiting
The museum is in via Gregorio XII, ten minutes on foot from the centre of Recanati and from Leopardi's house; single ticket or combined with the other town museums, with a weekly closing day and shorter hours out of season. An hour and a half.
Our editors' tip
In the Annunciation, while the angel comes in and Mary turns towards us, in the middle of the room a cat is bolting in terror with its back arched. It is the least solemn thing a painter could put into a sacred scene, and it explains in a second why Lotto is a painter unlike the others.