The Biblioteca e pinacoteca Zelantea is the municipal library and art gallery of Acireale, on via Marchese di Sangiuliano, in a neoclassical palace designed by the Acireale architect Mariano Panebianco. It takes its name from the Accademia degli Zelanti, founded in 1671 and later merged with other societies into the Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of the Zelanti and the Dafnici, which is still active.
What to see
The art gallery was born in the mid-nineteenth century from a private donation to the Academy, and later grew with other bequests. It mainly holds paintings from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century: prints by Guido Reni, etchings by Van Dyck, works by Guercino, Domenichino, Luca Giordano, Mattia Preti, the school of Pietro Novelli and the painters of Acireale, from Pietro Paolo and Alessandro Vasta to Giacinto Platania and Giuseppe Sciuti, as well as a work attributed to Rubens. The museum section has an eighteenth-century carriage of the Acireale Senate, a collection of weapons, a tricolour flag from the Risorgimento, Greek and Roman finds from the excavations of Santa Venera al Pozzo, minerals, coins and fossils, and the old processional float of San Michele.
The most famous piece is the so-called bust of Caesar, a high-quality Roman sculpture of the Republican age that is thought to show the features of Julius Caesar, found in 1675 at Capo Mulini. The library holds over two hundred and fifty thousand items, with an old collection of more than fifty-six thousand volumes, including 74 incunabula, over a thousand sixteenth-century editions and 370 manuscripts, and the collection of Lionardo Vigo, with more than seven thousand letters from leading figures of nineteenth-century Sicilian culture.
Visiting
According to the sources the art gallery can be visited on request to the staff: arrangements and hours should be checked with the library.
Our editors' tip
Ask about the Acis Hortus Regius: a herbarium painted in 1811 by Emanuele Grasso for the pharmacist Giuseppe Riggio, with 749 watercolour plates of the plants in his botanical garden.
