MUNDA - Museo Nazionale d'Abruzzo

The National Museum of Abruzzo was inaugurated on September 23, 1951 in the Castello Cinquecento of L'Aquila. The mighty Spanish fortress, passed after the Second World War from the military domain to that of the Antiquities and Fine Arts, had just been restored from the damage of the Nazi occupation. In addition to the deposits of the local Superintendence for Monuments and Galleries, the collections of the Museo Civico Aquilano, established at the end of the nineteenth century and dismantled in 1942 for war purposes, converged in the new Museum. In 1966, thanks to a convention, the works of the Diocesan Museum of Sacred Art, enlisted in 1935, were also received "in temporary storage". The church of L'Aquila, moreover, had already rendered meritorious to the treasures of art of the city, taking care during the most tragic months of the war, the precautionary transfer in the Vatican deposits, protected from bombing and depredations.

In the years 2010-2015 a careful repair and renovation intervention has adapted the complex of the former municipal slaughterhouse of L'Aquila, located in Borgo Rivera, to temporarily host a large and important selection of the collections of the Museum, which the earthquake of April 6, 2009 had dramatically ousted from the fifteenth-century Castle, their historical seat. In the new temporary headquarters, which is equipped with advanced anti-seismic garrisons, important archaeological finds are exposed and over one hundred masterpieces of painting, sculpture, goldsmiths, recovered among the ruins of the Castle and admirably restored. Hosting shows, concerts and conferences, the new Museum intends to offer a new center of aggregation and cultural life to a social fabric that is still severely torn and dispersed by the earthquake catastrophe of 2009.