The Flemish tapestries museum is a museum of the Marsala curia that displays a series of eight late-sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries, in a small but evocative building next to the mother church, to which they belong.
What to see
Through the gift of one of its most illustrious sons, Monsignor Antonino Lombardo, former bishop of Messina, Marsala possesses a precious series of eight Flemish tapestries: artistically, for this kind of production, it is certainly the most significant collection in Italy after the famous Battle of Pavia by Bernard van Orley in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. The eight cloths, described in the deed of gift of 1589 as «octo peccia pannorum de razza laborata serico et lana», are woven on a high-warp loom, that is a vertical frame, with an elegant interweaving of finely coloured wools and silks; about three and a half metres high, they are from a little over two and a half to five metres wide.
They tell the main events of the conquest of Jerusalem by the Romans Vespasian and Titus, in the years 66–68, following the text of the De Bello Judaico by the Jewish writer Josephus, who was also an active and decisive protagonist of the war and of the reconciliation between the two peoples. In the first tapestry Josephus, defender of Jotapata, comes out of the cave where he had taken refuge after the fall of the city; in the second Agrippa pleads before Vespasian the cause of the city threatened with destruction; in the third Vespasian is induced to accept the appointment as emperor decreed for him by the soldiers at Nero's death; in the fourth he receives the homage of a Syrian king; in the fifth he has Josephus freed from his chains; in the sixth the Jew Jonathan and the Roman Priscus fight; in the seventh the priest Jesus of Nabuth offers Titus two candlesticks and the sacred book for the resumption of worship in the temple; in the eighth Titus makes a sacrifice to Yahweh.
Visiting
The museum is owned by the mother church of Marsala, the Duomo of San Tommaso di Canterbury, which manages it, and is in a building next to the Duomo. Days, hours and tickets should be checked on the official site, museodegliarazzimarsala.com.
Our editors' tip
The museum is named after Monsignor Andrea Linares, archpriest of Marsala and parish priest of the Mother Church, who was its founder and a leading figure of the city.
