The MAU, Museo di archeologia urbana Giuseppe Fiorelli, stands in the centre of Lucera, inside Palazzo de Nicastri-Cavalli, a noble residence of the eighteenth century. It was born as a civic museum and was opened on 9 January 1905, on the initiative of the lawyer Girolamo Prignano, who gave the town his collections of antiquities and persuaded other Lucera families to do the same. Between 1934 and 1936 it was moved to its present home, in a wing of the palace left by will by Giuseppe Cavalli, and was dedicated to Giuseppe Fiorelli, an archaeologist of Lucera origins. Closed after the earthquake of 31 October 2002, it was entirely redisplayed and reopened completely in 2012.
What to see
You enter from the courtyard of the palace, where funerary cippi, inscriptions and an altar of the Roman age are placed, and go up the main staircase. The route counts some twenty rooms, from prehistory to the Middle Ages, and also includes rooms of the palace with period furnishings, among them the Cavalli drawing room, the kitchen and the chapel. On the ground floor are the flint weapons, the pre-Roman ceramics and the copies of the small bronzes of the so-called Lucera cart, found in a vineyard in the year 1800 and datable to the eighth century BC: the originals are in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
On the first floor is displayed the votive deposit of the Salvatore, found on the Belvedere hill and datable between the end of the fourth and the middle of the second century BC: terracottas offered to ask for healing, with hands, feet and other parts of the body, animals, swaddled infants, heads of young people, and a head of Minerva with her helmet. In the large hall is the polychrome mosaic with marine scenes, sea horses, tritons and dolphins, found in 1899 in Piazza Nocelli.
Visiting
The ticket office is on the left as you enter the courtyard. Times and prices should be checked with the museum or with the town council of Lucera.
Our editors' tip
At the top of the entrance staircase is a colossal bust of an emperor with the face entirely chiselled away. And among the sculptures look for the limestone column of the third century BC with mythical scenes on its four sides: Thetis on a sea horse with the armour of Achilles, Scylla devouring the companions of Ulysses, Polyphemus and Galatea, a farewell scene.
