The History of the Civic Museums of the Santissima Annunziata

The location, the history of the building, and its uses suggest that this cultural venue represents an important part of Sulmona’s identity for the citizens of Sulmona and functions as place of social gathering for the various cultural, theatrical and musical events taking place annually in the courtyard and auditorium.

The long history of the Church-Palace complex of the Santissima Annunziata in Sulmona began as far back as 10 March 1320 with the foundation of the Pio Ente della Casa Santa dell’Annunziata, which was a main protagonist of the city’s history and a well-deserving institution still working in the social field.

The side and rear wings of the complex were completed at different times, as documented by the dates on the architecture and on the coats of arms adorning the building’s courtyard: 1483, on the first window of the right-hand section; 1550, on the architrave of the entrance portal to the current medieval section of the Museum; 1531, on the connecting archway between the right wing and the façade body; 1543, on the last window on the left. The long building process seems to have ended towards the end of the 16th century. The bell tower, built between 1563 and 1590, rose up to a total height of over 65 metres. The date 1595, which is affixed on the side of its rear door, marks the completion of the complex. The sections of the building facing the courtyard have largely been modernised and transformed, while the loggia, windows and two portals are preserved from the original.

The project for a Sulmonese town museum matured in the last decades of the 19th century, and not by chance coincided with a particularly happy moment for historical research in Abruzzo, to which a small group of scholars from Sulmona, who started to form after the Unification of Italy, gave a substantial contribution.

The new institution was initially located in other churches and city palaces, which were used to preserve gravestones and other artefacts scattered in various courtyards and occasional deposits. At the end of the 19th century, the furnishings of the suppressed Santo Spirito al Morrone Abbey, which was assigned to the Sulmona municipality in 1894, were added to the initial collection. Since then, Palazzo dell’Annunziata became the first choice to host the museum, but it was only decades later that part of the historic building was made available, where both the archaeological finds and the mediaeval works were placed, as they had increased in number and quality after the fortunate recovery of the sculptures and paintings from the Church of Sant’Orante di Ortucchio, which was destroyed by the Marsica earthquake in 1915.

Finally, in the early 1960s, with the relocation of the Annunziata hospital, additional rooms became available, so that the entire upper floor of the main body of the building was reserved solely for the medieval and modern section, while the various archaeological collections were placed in other areas since the 1990s. In this way, it was possible to find a more adequate location for a wide selection of precious testimonies of Sulmona as a city ‘rich and full of people’, which in better times had also been the capital of Abruzzo.