Musea

The museum houses works from the Gulf Prize collection and the Cozzani and Battolini collections. In addition to these, other temporary exhibitions are periodically organised. The modern and contemporary art centre is located in Piazza C. Battisti, a few steps from the pedestrian area of the old town. The building in which the museum has been housed since 2004 dates back to 1879 and was first a primary school and, between 1920 and 1994, the city courthouse.

The most important Italian naval museum; of ancient origin and restored to its present location in 1958. It houses scale models of ships, a collection of naval figureheads, assault craft dating back to the ’15-’18 war.
including the prototype of Tesei and Toschi’s self-propelled torpedo (better known as the white-head torpedo), a room dedicated to antique weapons. Also of particular interest is the photographic documentation of Guglielmo Marconi’s first experiments with mobile receiving stations at the end of the 19th century.

This museum was opened in 1996 to house the numerous works of art donated during his lifetime by the collector Amedeo Lia to the City of La Spezia. It is located at 234 Via del Prione, in the pedestrian area of the historic centre. The building was originally the convent complex of the friars of San Francesco di Paola, then became a military hospital and later a civil hospital. It was later converted into barracks and after the war was used as a court building. In the 1990s, it underwent substantial renovation, necessary to make the building suitable for housing the prestigious museum.

The Museo Civico della Spezia dedicated to Ubaldo Formentini includes exhibits from Prehistory to the Middle Ages. It was founded in 1873 around an initial nucleus of naturalist collections donated by Cesare Podenzana (1840-1884). Only three months after its foundation, in addition to the zoological collections, the Museum already housed the archaeological discoveries that came to light during excavations of the docks and dockyards of the Military Arsenal. Among the objects found were parchments, geographical maps and documents relating to the history of the city. Subsequently, the Museum was enriched by the presence of menhir ‘stelae’ statues dating from the Copper and Iron Ages, and other archaeological, naturalistic and ethnographic artefacts. Today, after a careful restoration that lasted more than a decade, the museum is housed inside the Castle of San Giorgio.

The Ethnographic Museum, officially founded in 1906, is dedicated to Giovanni Podenzana (1864-1943), musician, ethnographer, naturalist and the first curator of the city’s Civic Museums. The first and most conspicuous group of museum collections is that collected and donated to the community by Giovanni Podenzana himself, gathered during explorations in faraway countries (such as Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, Samoa, Japan and the United States). The permanent exhibition also includes objects collected in the field by Podenzana in the Lunigiana area and deals with relevant themes such as devotion, popular cults, superstition, magic-therapeutic practices and traditional Ligurian jewellery. Other objects in the museum include: domestic furnishings, men’s personal items, tools for spinning and family weaving, as well as an important section of the museum that bears witness to the traditional costume of Lunigiana with many original pieces from the 19th century and blue cloth garments, forerunners of today’s jeans.

Housed in the Palazzina delle Arti “Lucio R. Rosaia”, a neo-Gothic building overlooking the ancient Via del Prione, the La Spezia Civic Seal Museum was founded in 2000 following the donation of one thousand five hundred seals by Mr. and Mrs. Lilian and Mr. Euro Capellini, representing the most complete collection of sealography ever assembled. In current parlance, “seal” means both the mould – the object (in stone, metal, wood or other) that bears the symbol to be reproduced – and the imprint – the product obtained by applying the mould to soft substances (clay, wax, sealing wax) or by printing. Through the exhibition of over one thousand five hundred original specimens, the Seal Museum in La Spezia aims to trace the development of impressions in the history of civilisation.