Pisa looks to the future with a major cultural project in the heart of its historical heritage. In the Piazza dei Miracoli, one of the world’s best-known UNESCO sites, work has officially begun on the creation of the Museum of Antiquities, a new museum institution promoted by theOpera della Primaziale Pisana, which promises to restore a new and fascinating narrative of the institution’s historical collections.
With a total extension of more than 3,700 square meters, the museum will be divided between 3,200 square meters inside the Monumental Cemetery and 550 square meters of new construction in adjoining rooms on the northwest side. It is scheduled to open in early 2027, but the construction site has already turned the spotlight on a project that combines enhancement of existing heritage, museographic innovation and dialogue between cultures.
The Museum of Antiquities will not be born ex novo, but will be developed as an organic evolution of the spaces and collections already present: the sarcophagi currently visible in the Monumental Cemetery will not be moved, but will become an integral part of the new exhibition itinerary, contributing to a coherent and immersive narrative.
“With the Museum of Antiquities,” says Andrea Maestrelli, President of the Opera, “the Opera della Primaziale is making a gesture of cultural and civic restitution: a heritage collected and guarded for centuries, in part already accessible, is now made fully usable and reorganized according to a unified project of valorization. This is a concrete way to grow the quality and depth of the experience in the Piazza dei Miracoli, which from the beginning of 2027 will be enriched by this new place to explore, know and experience.”
The core conceptual element of the new museum will be reuse: that is, the ability of civilizations to reinterpret, adapt and reuse objects, symbols and materials from the past, giving them new meanings. An approach that intends to overturn the static view of history to propose a dynamic and layered reading of heritage.
The artifacts-from Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman contexts-will be presented not as mere artistic testimonies, but as vital objects, artifacts that had a function, a use, and a specific role over the centuries before being welcomed into a museum context.
The museographic project, curated by Guicciardini & Magni Architetti, will follow this approach with a layout that will focus on the relationship between form, function and transformation over time. Leading the scientific vision is Professor Salvatore Settis, one of the most authoritative voices in Italian culture, who has been studying the theme of reuse for years and reflecting on the role of museums as critical spaces of knowledge and not mere containers of beauty.
Through a novel narrative, the Museum of Antiquities aims to restore Pisa’s historical vocation as a seafaring power, a crossroads of exchanges, ideas, goods and symbols. The display will show how the city’s identity has been shaped over the centuries by cultural influences from across the Mediterranean, in a weave that reflects the plurality of the ancient world.
The heart of the itinerary will be the collection of Roman sarcophagi, the second largest and most important in Italy after that of the Vatican Museums. But that’s not all: the museum will house Etruscan urns, Greek sculptures, fragments from the late antique period, Roman capitals and friezes, many of which have never been exhibited to the public and until now have been kept in the deposits of the Opera del Duomo.
Among the most emblematic pieces is a Roman frieze decorated with dolphins and shells, from the Basilica Neptuni located behind the Pantheon in Rome. This frieze, datable to the second century AD, was reused in the 12th century in a new architectural context. The project plans to display it high on a balcony, allowing visitors to observe both sides of it: the ancient and the medieval, thus offering a concrete view of the concept of reuse, which is not only functional but also symbolic and cultural. A detail that becomes a key to understanding the entire museum.
The subdivision of the spaces of the Museum of Antiquities will be designed to interweave chronological and thematic paths, encouraging the connection between works and context. The objects will dialogue with each other and with the very architecture of the Cemetery, a place charged with history and spirituality, where traces of the past coexist with the challenges of the present. The museum will also represent an opportunity for urban and tourist redevelopment, giving back to the international public - but also to the citizens of Pisa - a new reason to discover Piazza dei Miracoli in a different light.
The museographic project for the Museo delle Antichità del Camposanto di Pisa is based on the indications of the scientific committee appointed by the Opera Primaziale and the working group chaired by Professor Salvatore Settis. On the basis of the historical and archaeological premises, a project was carried out to develop a museum itinerary that, starting from the historical spaces of the Cemetery (equal to 3,200 square meters), subject to minimal interventions related to the lighting system and the graphic supports dedicated to the works on display, is developed mainly in the rooms leaning against the north side of the complex, that is, in rooms that owe their current connotation to recent renovations.
The new 550-square-meter museum itinerary begins at the entrance to the Ammannati Chapel and is divided into two main parts: the exhibition section to the west, dedicated to those archaeological works and artifacts that, although part of the Opera Primaziale’s collection, were not on display in the Cemetery, and the section of the visitable deposit to the east, in which the archaeological material is set up, within a space dedicated to the practice of restoration in the end of the visitable deposit, which overlooks the active laboratory for restoration operations conducted on the works by the Opera Primaziale’s experts.
The exhibition section constitutes to all intents and purposes a new museum in which groups of ancient works with different provenances, and in fact dating back to Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman civilizations, are displayed. The exhibition space consists of 270 square meters, to which is added a 135-square-meter gallery, served by an elevator and two staircases; the path itself is narrow on the long sides between a section of the medieval city walls and between the perimeter wall of the Cemetery.
“As in all the museums that we design,” the Guicciardini & Magni firm points out, “the route is enhanced by the architecture that generates it, the historical architecture of the monument and the modern architecture of the interventions that now overlap it. In the ceiling of the museum room, a veiled skylight reopens, covering the structures of the roof, but allowing the data of the instant, of the atmospheric situation in which the museum is immersed, to shine through. A passing cloud, changing light, the flow of climatic moments create unstable situations that reinforce and specify the reading of the works in the time of the now, the time to which the works and the visitors themselves simultaneously belong. Part of the experience of the visit depends precisely on the link with the place, the Pisa Cemetery and its location alongside the solid city walls, of which some features are enhanced precisely within the museum exhibition chamber.”
“We imagine,” they continue, “that from the upper gallery of the museum a connection can be created to the specific situation in which the visitor finds himself, dilating the exhibition box toward a perception strongly linked to the geographical, historical, atmospheric location outside. Hence the idea of opening the path outward to the west, opening the view from the gallery to a corner circumscribed by the wall development and the corner tower of the city walls, until catching the summit on which was placed the marble Roman lion (now replaced by a copy), symbol of a sought-after expression of power of the Pisan maritime republic. The portion into which the overlook is grafted was made during the 1951 works, that is, when the roof of the large volume that we now allocate as the Museum of Antiquity was made. The operation we propose consists of a reinterpretation that minimally carves the external mass of the façade at a point lacking in merit, fitting in with measure in the architectural setting of the square. A simple glazed appendage supported by an oxidized metal frame may be enough to build a small new vision, a small revelation in the lawn of the square.”
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| A new museum will rise in Pisa: work begins on the Museum of Antiquities in Piazza dei Miracoli |
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