Italy hotel booking - filcoo Italy hotels, hotel Italy, bed and breakfast Italy, bed&breakfast Italy, b&b Italy, Italy travel guide

Italy bed&breakfast and hotels: Reserve your accomodation online

Home

Edit & Cancel booking

Support

Hotels in Italy

Italy Travel Guide

Home > Italy Travel Guide > Pisa Travel Guide > Cathedral Museum (Museo dell'Opera del Duomo)

Cathedral Museum

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Introduction
History
Location

ATTRACTIONS

Whats to See

INFORMATION

Useful information
Links

Introduction

East of the Piazza del Duomo is the Cathedral Museum (Museo dell'Opera del Duomo), with art from the buildings situated in the Piazza and the valuable treasury including embroideries, tombs, silver church objects, sculpture and pictures.

History

Originally conceived as the Cathedral House of the canons, who lived there from the end of the 12th to the beginning of the 17th century, the building comprised two brick-made rectangular structures, which were L-shaped and circumscribed a cloister. These structures can still be detected despite the adjustments required by the conversion of the building into a diocesan seminary, commissioned by Bishop Carlo Antonio Dal Pozzo (1582-1607). He also commissioned the current facade, marked by a clear Florentine style, on whose light-coloured plaster stand the windows and the two symmetric portals cut in sandstone. After the seminary had moved in l784, the building became private property: it was sold to the erudite art collector Giovanni Rosini. During that time it lodged the Pisan Academy of Fine Arts for a short period, and then it was set aside for religious purposes again in 1887, when it was converted into a convent. The drastic structure alteration resulting from the conversion were restored recently during the intervention which started in 1979, when the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo bought the building to convert it into a museum.

Location

Address: Piazza Arcivescovado 6, Pisa, Italy
Transit: Bus: 1, 3, or 11

Whats to See

The exhibition takes up rooms on two different floors. Room 1 has models of the Duomo buildings and engraved glass plans showing the square's history and geometry. Room 3 has delicate 12th-century carvings and intarsia marble decoration displaying a strong Moorish influence and a massive 12th-century wooden crucifix from Burgundy. But the main attraction is the Islamic 11th-century bronze griffin, war booty from the Crusades, which long decorated the Duomo's cupola before it was replaced by a copy.

Room 6 has curving ranks of faded-to-facelessness 13th-century Giovanni Pisano statues from the baptistery. The treasury has two Pisanos: a wooden crucifix and a the Madonna con Bambino he carved from a curving ivory tusk (1299). Also here is a precious Pisan relic, the cross that led Pisans on the First Crusade.

The last few rooms house the precious legacy of Carlo Lasinio, who restored the Camposanto frescoes in the early 19th century and, fortunately for posterity, made a series of etchings of each fresco, the prints from which were colored by his son. Not only did the original publication of these prints have an important influence on the developing pre-Raphaelite movement at the time, but they're the best record we have of the paintings that went up in flames when the Camposanto was bombed in 1944.

Useful information

Telephone: 050-560-547
Open: April to September daily: 8am to 7:20pm
March and October : 9am to 5:20pm.
November to February: 9am to 4:20pm
Disabled: Full facilities for persons with disabilities.

Links

Website

Hotels in Pisa
Hotel Da Carlos Single room - From 65€ Double room - From 75€ Triple room - From 90€ Visit hotel page
Grand Hotel San Marco Single room - From 90€ Double room - From 100€ Triple room - From 150€ Visit hotel page
Agrihotel Il Palagetto Double room - From 80€ Visit hotel page
Albergo Vittoria Italia Double room - From 80€ Visit hotel page
Agriturismo Green Farm Single room - From 52€ Double room - From 69€ Triple room - From 81€ Visit hotel page
Relais dell'Ussero Double room - From 100€ Visit hotel page
Casa Lami Double room - From 65€ Visit hotel page
Casale Le Torri Double room - From 78€ Triple room - From 105€ Apartment - From 100€ Visit hotel page
Antica Residenza Del Gallo Edgar - From 65€ Turandot - From 85€ Butterfly - From 85€ Visit hotel page
Burlamacco Camera doppia con - From 45€ Triple room - From 65€ Quadruple room - From 80€ Visit hotel page
Hotel i Pini Double room - From 100€ Visit hotel page