Description
The Museo Civico at Castello Ursino is Catania's great museum, housed since 1934 in the castle that Frederick II of Swabia built in the 13th century. Under the medieval vaults you move from Roman statues and Greek vases to paintings by Mattia Preti, Ribera and El Greco.
The ground floor is mostly antiquity. The colossal torso of a Julio-Claudian emperor portrayed as Jupiter, a Hercules wearing the lion skin, fragments from the Roman theater and the mosaic from the baths with the words "Vtere Feliciter", a wish for a good bath, greet you as you enter.
The Hall of Saint George displays about two thousand ancient small bronzes, next to the relief of Demeter and Kore, carved around 420 BC and found in Catania in 1930. Among the Greek vases, a red-figure krater with Perseus showing the head of Medusa stands out.
The first floor holds the picture gallery. The first room shows El Greco's Portrait of a Gentleman; in the Hall of Parliaments you can see the Mocking of Christ by Matthias Stomer, lit by a single candle, and Mattia Preti's Saint Luke Painting, who works seated on an ox.
The hall also has a painting with a story: the only existing copy of Caravaggio's Nativity, painted in 1627 by Paolo Geraci. The original, stolen by the Mafia in Palermo in 1969, has never been found.
The collections grew out of two famous private ones: that of the Prince of Biscari, the 18th-century nobleman and archaeologist, and that of the Benedictine monks of San Nicolò l'Arena. The castle was chosen because it was the only building in the city big enough to hold them.
The walls are worth a look too. In the courtyard, the 15th-century portal still bears names, verses and drawings carved by prisoners from the time when the castle was a jail. On the ground floor, an inscription from the senate loggia proclaims the expulsion of the Jews from Catania in 1492.
The castle itself was the royal palace of the Aragonese kings of Sicily and hosted the Sicilian Parliament: it was here, in 1434, that King Alfonso signed the act founding the University of Catania.
The ground floor is mostly antiquity. The colossal torso of a Julio-Claudian emperor portrayed as Jupiter, a Hercules wearing the lion skin, fragments from the Roman theater and the mosaic from the baths with the words "Vtere Feliciter", a wish for a good bath, greet you as you enter.
The Hall of Saint George displays about two thousand ancient small bronzes, next to the relief of Demeter and Kore, carved around 420 BC and found in Catania in 1930. Among the Greek vases, a red-figure krater with Perseus showing the head of Medusa stands out.
The first floor holds the picture gallery. The first room shows El Greco's Portrait of a Gentleman; in the Hall of Parliaments you can see the Mocking of Christ by Matthias Stomer, lit by a single candle, and Mattia Preti's Saint Luke Painting, who works seated on an ox.
The hall also has a painting with a story: the only existing copy of Caravaggio's Nativity, painted in 1627 by Paolo Geraci. The original, stolen by the Mafia in Palermo in 1969, has never been found.
The collections grew out of two famous private ones: that of the Prince of Biscari, the 18th-century nobleman and archaeologist, and that of the Benedictine monks of San Nicolò l'Arena. The castle was chosen because it was the only building in the city big enough to hold them.
The walls are worth a look too. In the courtyard, the 15th-century portal still bears names, verses and drawings carved by prisoners from the time when the castle was a jail. On the ground floor, an inscription from the senate loggia proclaims the expulsion of the Jews from Catania in 1492.
The castle itself was the royal palace of the Aragonese kings of Sicily and hosted the Sicilian Parliament: it was here, in 1434, that King Alfonso signed the act founding the University of Catania.