Museo Civico - Principe Guglielmo Romanazzi Carducci di Santo Mauro

Brief history of the Romanazzi Carducci palace and family.

Located in the heart of the ancient town of the city, the Romanazzi Carducci palace is one of the jewels of the Apulian historical and artistic heritage. The current configuration of the building reflects mostly the renovation and renovation works that took place during the 19th century. But the history of the building begins already in the Middle Ages, when it hosted the cisiddetto Balì. So it was called the feudal lord of the city (which in the fourteenth century became a possession of the Order of Knights of Malta and will remain until the nineteenth century). With the abolition of feudalism in 1806, the palace passed to the State Property, which put it up for sale. The building thus came to the middle of the century (XIX) bought by the Romanazzi Carducci family, one of the richest in the city. The palace as we see it today is closely linked to the figure of the Marquis Guglielmo (born in 1881), who later became Prince, thanks to his marriage with Princess Giulia Saluzzo from Corigliano of the noble family of the Neapolitan princes of Santomauro. Each room shows the memory of the life of the Prince and his family, including that of his daughter Maria Alasia married in 1932 to Mario Lombardo Duca di Cumia. In 1967, a year before his death, with a testamentary gesture, Prince William, last male heir of the family, donates the entire building to the City, so that it could be transformed into a museum. The entrance room is the pivot around which the entire body of the building develops: on the right, in sequence, the rooms destined for the public life of the family, the moments of representation, meeting, guests. On the left behind a large, heavy wooden door, the dining room opens from which the rooms destined for the Prince's life moments start.

Music Salon and Yellow Salon. These two environments are the most striking part of the whole building. The piano is dominated by the first room, the emblem of one of the Prince's favorite passions and of his entire family. Really interesting then the vault decorated with a mythological scene, as usual happens in the seventeenth-nineteenth-century buildings. The yellow hall is the most fascinating environment of the entire building for its period furniture, which reflects the fashion and tastes of the time. All the furniture was the subject of a very recent restoration (2015) that brought it back to its ancient beauty. Even in this room the vault is lavishly painted with a mythological subject.

Guest rooms and chapel. Adjacent to the yellow salon are the two bedrooms designed to accommodate guests. On the left the one called "White Room" hosted Prince Umberto of Savoy, the future king of Italy, in one of his visits here in Putignano. These visits took place on three different occasions in 1933, 1935, 1942; but the most important was that on the occasion of the inauguration of the Grotta del Trullo. On the right of the yellow hall, the sequence of rooms opens to host, in the last phase of the palace life and in particular during the war, the family of the Prince's daughter, Maria Alasia, with her three children, while the Duke Lombardo di Cumia was at the front. The first room improperly called the "King's Room" is said so because it was the first of the rooms where Prince Umberto of Savoy was housed. The bathroom with beautiful period furnishings and prints with female figures on the walls, which reflect the great aesthetic taste of the owner, stands out among the two bedrooms. This wing of the building, at the end of the corridor, closes the chapel, destined to moments of religious recollection.

Dining room and garden. The room is a triumph of art and curiosity: on the walls stand still life of eighteenth-century taste coming probably from Naples. Also interesting are the elegant and precious porcelains kept in the windows, some of which were personalized by the Prince with the family crest, perhaps on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter Maria Alasia. From the windows it is possible to glimpse the hanging garden, another significant place in the life and history of the building.   Private rooms of the Prince. From the dining room you can access the rooms for the Prince's private life, all with direct access to the garden. After the bedroom, the sequence of rooms that tell the prince's private life begins: the archive with the bookcases containing over 3000 volumes donated to the municipal library, the private study with the safe, the hunting trophies, the photos of the Prince on horseback. Hunting and horses were the prince's greatest passions: the first was the collection of nineteenth-century rifles (once placed in this room and now moved for safety reasons). The collection was subsequently increased by a donation made by the Ministry and today boasts almost a thousand pieces. A small corridor gives access to the innermost core of the building: from the rooms used as a cloakroom and shoe rack to the private bedroom of the Prince. This is the room also called "del pinocchio": it is a puppet / puppet, which the Prince received as a gift from an Italian community on a trip to Australia and which he gave as a gift to his daughter Maria Alasia.