San Severo - Culture - Museums, Libraries and Archives

Museums, Libraries and Archives

The preservation and promotion of artistic heritage, the city's books, and periodicals are the raison d'être of a number of important public and private institutions that promote the cultural development of San Severo and its surroundings.

• The Museum of the Tavoliere (MAT) is set in an eighteenth-century Franciscan monastery, also known as Palazzo San Francesco. It retains a considerable archaeological heritage, with exhibits from the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages, and a gallery with works of the modern age.
  • Pinacoteca "Luigi Schingo" is a section of MAT, with headquarters in Palazzo San Francesco; it holds some works of the Sanseveresi artist Louis Schingo.
  • The community library "Alexander Minutia" is now located temporarily in the Palazzo San Francesco. The historic institution, originally called Ferdinandea, boasts a heritage of over ninety thousand volumes of books and a prestigious background of ancient writings, as well as many rare incunabula.
• The Diocesan Museum contains sacred art, housed in the basement of the Palazzo del Seminario, with silver, vestments, and works of different eras. Among the most significant artifacts are a collection of medieval collection plates embossed with copper, and some medieval and Renaissance polychrome wooden statues.
• A permanent display of carriages and finishes of the eighteenth century was built in 2007 on Viale Matteotti. It is part of the cultural initiatives promoted by the banking group BancApulia.
• The "Father Benedetto Nardella" of Friars Minor Capuchin Library, housed in the seventeenth-century convent of Santa Maria of Constantinople, holds twenty thousand volumes on mysticism, spirituality, St. Pio of Pietrelcina, and patriotic history.
• The "Happy Chir" economic-legal Library, made from BancApulia Gramsci, holds over fifty thousand texts and journals used frequently by students and scholars.
• Historical Archives: The Municipal Library, contains a vast collection of documents on civil and administrative life of the city in modern and contemporary art.
• Archival diocesan Trotta is housed in the Palace, near the Cathedral, and boasts a rich documentary of heritage, conservation, and a significant number of parchments and episcopal archives.
• The Music Fund of the Benedictine monastery of San Lorenzo includes autographs of important Italian composers of the eighteenth century.

Exhibitions of various kinds (archeology, painting, photography etc.) are more or less regularly staged at the Museum, the Diocesan Museum and the Gallery of Modern Art in Palazzo San Lorenzo.