There are two paintings by Antonello da Messina in Reggio Calabria, and almost nobody knows it. They are not in the archaeological museum, where all the city’s tourism goes, but in a municipal gallery opened in 2008 inside the theatre. Antonello’s most famous work is in Palermo instead, the Virgin Annunciate of Palazzo Abatellis.
They are two very small panels, painted when the artist was starting out, and they are the kind of work you would walk past in a crowded museum. Here instead they are the first room, and on an autumn morning you will probably have them to yourself.
The rest of the collection does not stand comparison and does not claim to, but it holds a decent Neapolitan seventeenth century and a Calabrian twentieth century you will not see elsewhere. It is worth the hour it asks.
An art gallery inside a theatre, and why
Why would a town council put its picture collection inside a theatre rather than in a building of its own? Because until eighteen years ago it had no home for it, and the paintings were scattered.
The Civic Art Gallery was inaugurated on 26 May 2008 with a specific job: to gather the collections owned by the municipality, which were spread across other museums, offices and stores. The site chosen was the Teatro Francesco Cilea, on corso Garibaldi, the most central building the council had.
You see the consequence as you go in: the spaces are those of an adapted theatre, not of a gallery conceived as one, and the route is short. That is not a flaw to hide: it is the reason this visit costs an hour rather than half a day, and why you can fit it between the archaeological museum and the seafront.
The two panels, and how small they are
The thing nobody expects is the size. You expect two altarpieces and you find two objects you could hold in your hand.
Saint Jerome Penitent measures 40.2 by 30.2 centimetres. Abraham Served by Three Angels measures 21.4 by 29.3 centimetres. They are panels painted for private devotion, made to sit in a room and be looked at closely by one person, and current dating places them around the middle of the 1450s, among Antonello’s earliest known works. Some records date them to 1455, others between 1457 and 1460: that is the range, and anyone who gives it to you closed is simplifying.
Looking at them two centimetres from the glass is not bad manners, it is the way they were painted to be seen.
Saint Jerome Penitent, and the red robe on the ground
This is the finer of the two, and it reads as a story in three points.
On the right, crouched among the rocks, a half-naked Jerome beats his chest with a stone, turned towards the crucifix hung on a bare tree at the far edge of the panel. In the centre, behind a low wall of dressed stone, the muzzle of the lion tradition assigns him comes forward, looking straight out at you. And in the foreground, thrown on the grass, lies the red cardinal’s robe with its hat, along with his shoes and a closed book.
What does that robe on the ground tell us? It tells us the whole subject without writing it out. Jerome had been the most learned and most prominent man in Latin Christendom, and the retreat into the desert is the gesture by which he sheds it: he took the office off like a garment, and the painter puts it in the foreground, right up against the viewer, instead of leaving it out.
Around him is a landscape of rocks and saplings with a river losing itself towards blue mountains. It is the Flemish lesson Antonello had learned in Naples, in Colantonio’s workshop, and would take to Venice only twenty years later.
Abraham and the three angels, and the missing host
The second panel tells the episode in Genesis where three travellers arrive at Abraham’s camp, and he serves them without knowing who they are.
The three angels stand on the right, in identical white robes, with wings and pilgrim staffs in their hands. On the left is a round table, laid and empty, resting on a tree stump, with a wicker basket at its foot. Between them, the path and the grass, painted blade by blade, with a crouching quail and a few stones.
The protagonist, though, is not there. The painter chose the moment before: the guests have arrived, the table is ready, and the host has not yet come on stage. In the distance, very small, you can make out the tents of the encampment, the one thing that tells us where we are.
It is a very modern piece of staging, and in a panel twenty-one centimetres wide it demands a control of space that on its own explains why this painter, twenty years later, would change Venetian painting.
How they came to Reggio
They are not an old bequest and not spoils: they are a documented purchase, and a recent one.
The two panels belonged to the collection of Giovan Battista Rota, descendant of a noble Reggio family, and the Comune di Reggio Calabria bought them between 1890 and 1891. That is why they are municipal property today and stand here rather than in the state museum five hundred metres away, which confuses many visitors.
They were restored in 2020, and the work gave back the legibility of the landscape in the Saint Jerome, which was the part most obscured by oxidised varnish.
From the seventeenth century to the twentieth: Preti, Giordano and the Reggio painters
Past the first room, the gallery changes register and becomes a local collection, with two substantial exceptions.
The first is Mattia Preti, a Calabrian from Taverna, with a large Return of the Prodigal Son measuring 216 by 231 centimetres and dated 1656. The second is Luca Giordano, from Naples, with a Christ and the Adulteress of the same years: two canvases that record the moment when the painting of the Italian south worked for the whole of Europe.
Then the route drops to the Calabrian nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the landscapes of Giuseppe Benassai, the scenes of Giuseppe Spadaro and some works by Renato Guttuso, plus a section of sculpture and marble busts. It is the part that says least to a visitor passing through, and a great deal to anyone who wants to understand how this region has told its own story.
Anyone who has seen the Preti here and wants to follow the thread will find it in my piece on Mattia Preti, the painter who went from Calabria all the way to the vault of the co-cathedral in Malta.
Practical information
Details checked on 6 September 2026 on the pages of the Comune di Reggio Calabria, which runs the art gallery and the castle directly. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Entry to the art gallery is bought together with entry to the Aragonese Castle: the combined ticket costs 7 euros for non-residents, while the castle alone costs 5 euros. The council does not publish a price for the art gallery on its own, so it is worth asking at the desk.
Reductions and free entry. The reduced ticket costs 2 euros and is for residents and for students aged 6 to 18. Entry is free for children up to 6, for over-70s and for people with disabilities with their companion. Groups get one free entry for every ten paying.
Hours. Monday to Friday it opens 8:30-13:00, with last entry at 12:30, and 14:30-19:00, with last entry at 18:30. On Saturdays it opens only 14:30-19:00. On Sundays and public holidays it opens 9:00-13:00, with last entry at 12:30.
Careful: it is closed on Saturday mornings. It is the opening time that wastes the most visits, because it is exactly when a weekend visitor expects to find it open.
Getting there. The art gallery is at the Teatro Francesco Cilea, on corso Garibaldi, five minutes on foot from the archaeological museum and three from the seafront.
Payment. The ticket is paid through the pagoPA platform of the Calabria region, so bring your smartphone and allow time for it.
How long it takes. The visit takes an hour if you really stop in front of the two panels, forty minutes if you look at them and move on.
What is nearby
The right way to fit it in is straight after the Aragonese Castle, with which it shares a ticket and which stands five minutes uphill: the two visits together take two hours.
For the overall picture of the city, my guide on what to see in Reggio Calabria lays out the stops of a single day. Five hundred metres away are the National Archaeological Museum with the Riace Bronzes, and the castle with the Greek walls and the baths is in the article on the Falcomatà seafront. Since June 2026 another Antonello can be seen in Italy, bought by the state at auction and displayed at the MuNDA in the Spanish fort of L’Aquila: it is an Ecce Homo painted on both sides, with a Saint Jerome on the verso.
Photographs: the facade of the Teatro Cilea by Vittorio Martire (CC BY-SA 4.0) and the works in the gallery by Benjamin Smith (public domain), from Wikimedia Commons.
