In 1914 Father Luigi Sturzo, then mayor of Caltagirone, founded the civic museum that now carries his name. The setting is anything but neutral: the former Bourbon prison, a building the town senate ordered to be raised “in the manner of a castle,” in memory of the castle levelled by the Val di Noto earthquake of 1693. The commission went to Natale Bonaiuto of Syracuse.
What to see
The facade sets the register: a giant order of Ionic pilasters on a tall base carries a projecting cornice, while the windows on both floors are marked by mixtilinear pediments and rusticated frames with scrolls. At the centre sits the large civic coat of arms. Inside, the collections fall into three sections. The archaeological section gathers Neolithic finds from the Sant'Ippolito and Pille sites, Bronze and Iron Age grave goods from the Montagna necropolis — including tholos tombs among the closest in Sicily to Greek-Mycenaean models — and material from the Siculo-Greek centre of Monte San Mauro. The picture gallery shows canvases by mostly Sicilian painters from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: the standout is the Conversion of Saint Paul by Pietro D'Asaro, known as the “One-Eyed Man of Racalmuto,” alongside a sixteenth-century panel of Saint Anthony of Padua and the large holding of the Vaccaro family, who in Caltagirone marked the shift from Classicism to Romanticism. The history section keeps the processional float of San Giacomo, a sixteenth-century work in gilded and silvered wood by the Neapolitan Scipione di Guido.
Visiting
The collections were assembled by the naturalist and archaeologist Emanuele Taranto Rosso and opened to the public as early as 1843, at the Jesuit College, under the name “Cabinet of natural history and archaeology.” Today the main route runs through the old prison: on the ground floor you can still read the large cells for common prisoners, with chains and iron grilles, while the isolation cells survive up in the attic. The civic museums do not end here — the permanent natural-history display occupies the former monastery of San Gregorio, and the civic gallery of modern and contemporary art fills the old Women's Hospital.
Our editors' tip
Short on time, most visitors stop at the picture gallery, but the archaeological section is the one that tells the land's story: the tholos tombs from the Montagna necropolis are worth the detour on their own. Before you leave, look up at the facade and find the civic coat of arms at its crown — the signature of a building born as a prison and turned into the keeper of Caltagirone's memory.