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Please note that the updated version of the website in English is under construction. We apologise for the inconvenience.
In the meantime, we provide below the essential information for visiting the museum.
Opening hours
- Tuesday and Thursday: 2 pm > 7 pm
- Wednesday and Friday: 10 am > 7 pm
- Saturday, Sunday and Holidays: 10 am > 6.30 pm
The ticket office closes 30 minutes before the museum
Museum Entrance Fees
- Full rate: € 6
- Reduced rate: € 4
- Free admission for Card Cultura holders
Services
bookshop|app MuseOn ita/eng | differently-abled access| cloakroom for individuals and groups | guided tours | education services for schools | workshops for families | library | photographic archive | hystorical archive
How to get here
From railway or bus station:
on foot > from Piazza Medaglie d’Oro follow Via Indipendenza to the Neptune fountain and Piazza Maggiore, then enter the Palazzo Comunale (City Hall). The museum is on the second floor.
Access either by the monumental stairway or by elevator | approximately 1,5 km
by bus > all lines stopping at Piazza Maggiore
by car > underground parking area in Piazza VIII Agosto
Info
Collezioni Comunali d'Arte (City Art Collections)
Piazza Maggiore 6 | 40121 Bologna
tel. +39 051 2193998 / 2193631
www.museibologna.it/collezionicomunali
museiarteantica@comune.bologna.it
For educational services and guided tours: musarteanticascuole@comune.bologna.it
The museum's highlights
The museum is staged in the rooms decorated with friezes and ceilings painted between the 1500s and 1700s, restored in 1934 under the direction of Guido Zucchini. The works on display come from different donations of paintings, furniture, decorations and furnishings given to the city of Bologna during the 1800s and early 1900s and enrich the ancient core collection of masterpieces belonging to the city magistrates. Of particular interest are those from important collections of works by the artists Pelagio Palagi and Cincinnato Baruzzi, as well as those purchased by collectors in the field of applied arts and furniture (bequests by Pepoli and Rusconi).
The rich artistic heritage preserved by the Collezioni Comunali d’Arte (City Art Collections) ranges from the thirteenth century to the early twentieth century: carved wooden crosses, painted panels by Vitale da Bologna, Jacopo di Paolo (Annunciation), Luca Signorelli (Magdalene’s Head), Francesco Francia (Crucifiction). Furthermore, important paintings by artists from Bologna and the Emilia region in the early 1500s (Amico Aspertini, Tamaroccio) and late 1500s (Bartolomeo Passerotti and Ludovico Carracci), followed by a large number of works from the Emilian school of the 1600s (Alessandro Tiarini, Guido Cagnacci, Michele Desubleo, Francesco Gessi) and other schools including an extraordinary Gonfalonier’s Portrait painted in 1622 by the Artemisia Gentileschi.
Under the frescoed vault of the Galleria Vidoniana, commissioned in 1665 by Cardinal Legate Pietro Vidoni, one of the museum’s most important collections can be viewed: 18 paintings made between 1713 and 1723 by Donato Creti and donated by the patron Marcantonio Collina Sbaraglia to the Bologna Senate in 1744.
From here you can reach the Sala Urbana, a stateroom commissioned in 1630 by Bernardino Spada, Cardinal Legate of Pope Urban VIII. The walls are covered with the coats of arms of the Governors and Legates that served in Bologna from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth Century. The ceiling is decorated with an extraordinary “framing” fresco painted by Angelo Michele Colonna, who used a special optical effect to make the room look taller and more solemn, namely he recreated on top of the walls a fake colonnade supporting a ceiling with three openings onto the sky.
In the Rusconi rooms the refined atmosphere of private eighteenth Century houses comes back to life. They are located in a museum’s wing ending, which leads to a magnificent wild room whose walls are covered with greenery images.
A section is dedicated to Pelagio Palagi, an artist of great stature in the field of painting, interior design, ornamentation and applied arts reflecting Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Actively engaged in carrying out important artistic commissions in Rome, Milan, and especially in Turin at the Savoy court, Palagi is remembered in Bologna primarily as a collector. His huge artistic and historical collections helped to decisively enrich the Bolognese museums in the years following the Unification of Italy.
Finally, two rooms of the museum are dedicated to the art of the 1800s and early 1900s. Standing out among the paintings are the famous Ruth by Francesco Hayez, the Portrait of Cincinnato Baruzzi by Karl Bryullov and Auxilium ex alto (Help form Above) by Alfredo Savini.
Also representative of the cultural climate in Bologna between the two centuries are the marble sculpture The Eel by Giorgio Kienerk, restructuring projects of historical buildings in the city by the architects of the ‘Comitato per la Bologna Storico Artistica' (Committee for Bologna’s History and Arts) and the lace and embroidery of Aemilia Ars, the Bologna-based company which in those years represented one of the most advanced examples of the renewal of applied arts in Italy and Europe.