In the old centre of Naples, three minutes from the Cathedral, a nineteenth-century building now houses Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Richard Serra and Rebecca Horn. The Madre is the Campania Region’s contemporary art museum, and it didn’t buy its first floor: in 2005 it had twelve artists build it, each working on a room.
The ticket costs eight euros, and on weekends guided tours and workshops are free for anyone holding one: that’s simply how the museum runs on Saturdays and Sundays. The day to avoid is another one: the Madre closes on Tuesdays, while the Certosa and the Royal Palace close on Wednesdays and Castel Nuovo on Sundays, which makes it the closing day people forget most easily.
Watch the name too: in Naples there are two museums called Donnaregina, right next to each other, and they aren’t the same place. If you’re looking for the fourteenth century frescoes and a queen’s tomb, you’re fifty metres from the right door, but this isn’t it.
Why, in the rooms where Kapoor and Koons hang today, did Neapolitans once pawn their grandfather’s watch?
A contemporary art museum inside a former pawnshop
Why does a contemporary art museum share its name with a medieval convent? Because it takes its name from the building, and the building has changed trade three times. Palazzo Donnaregina is a nineteenth century structure occupying an insula of the Greco-Roman grid, one of the rectangular blocks into which the ancient city was divided: under the nineteenth century facade sits a plot laid out more than two thousand years ago.
In the mid nineteenth century the palazzo was acquired by the Banco di Napoli and turned into the seat of the Banco dei Pegni, the institution where objects were pawned for cash, and between 1845 and 1872 it was expanded for that purpose. A museum that today exhibits Anish Kapoor and Jeff Koons occupies the rooms where Neapolitans once pawned their grandfather’s watch.
The next chapter is recent, and it starts with a disaster: after the damage of the 2001 flood, the building was bought in 2005 by the Campania Region, which earmarked it for a museum. The restoration and conversion project is by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira, with Studio DAZ-Dumontet Antonini Zaske, and the museum opened its spaces in June 2005, with the building completed by 2006. Today the exhibition space covers seven thousand two hundred square metres.
This layering is visible as you walk through: the rooms have different sizes and heights from one another because they weren’t built for exhibitions, and Siza chose to leave them uneven rather than level them into a run of white cubes.
The twelve rooms commissioned from artists
What sets the Madre apart from other Italian museums of contemporary art is how its first floor came about. The museum didn’t open by buying works: it opened by commissioning them for its own rooms. The first floor galleries are site specific installations from 2005, pieces designed for that wall, that light and those dimensions.
Twelve artists were invited: Domenico Bianchi, Francesco Clemente, Luciano Fabro, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Mimmo Paladino, Giulio Paolini and Richard Serra.
Some of the titles alone show how seriously the commission was taken: Ave Ovo by Clemente, Spirits by Horn, Dark Brother by Kapoor, 10.000 Lines by Sol LeWitt, Giuditta e Oloferne by Richard Serra, and an untitled work by Paladino, all from 2005.
The practical consequence for visitors is that these rooms don’t change. Temporary exhibitions come and go, the collection is rehung, but the first floor is the part of the museum you’ll find identical whatever month you decide to come, and it justifies the visit on its own, even if the current programme doesn’t interest you.
The collection the museum built afterward
How do you put together a collection once the museum has already opened? It’s the problem the Madre faced, having opened with twelve commissions and no holdings of its own. It tackled it the opposite way round from usual: a collection building project launched in 2013 and still ongoing, instead of a bulk acquisition.
How that collection is displayed changes over time, organised in successive chapters. As I write, the third is under way, curated by Eva Fabbris: come back in a year and the collection will be the same but the story told will be different, which is a declared risk and not a failure of planning.
Watch out for one part of the museum you can’t currently visit: the Library-Mediatheque spaces are temporarily closed to the public. Several write ups in circulation still list them among the reasons to come, and that’s no longer true.
The exhibitions on now, and how long they run
The temporary exhibition programme is the reason it’s worth checking the website before you go, since three of the four things you’d see in a few months aren’t there yet.
As of this article the main exhibition is Maria Lai. Essere è tessere, curated by Mónica Amor and Carlos Basualdo, open since 25 June and running until 12 October 2026: sixty years of work by the Sardinian artist, from looms to sewn books to the collective pieces in which she involved entire villages. It’s the exhibition worth choosing a date for, and you’ll also find it on our Naples exhibitions page, kept updated separately.
Alongside it are Gli anni. Capitolo 3 and Living Collapse, both running until 5 October 2026. I’m naming them with their dates because that’s the only information that matters: if you’re reading this article after autumn 2026, none of these three will still be up, and the new programme is on the museum’s website.
Watch out: the Donnaregina you’re after might be the other one
This is where people get the wrong door, because the two museums are fifty metres apart and share the same name.
The Madre is the contemporary art museum, occupying Palazzo Donnaregina, on via Settembrini, and it closes on Tuesdays. The Diocesan Museum of Naples is a different museum, housed by the church of Santa Maria Donnaregina Nuova, on largo Donnaregina, and its visit also includes the fourteenth century church of Santa Maria Donnaregina Vecchia.
It’s there, and not at the Madre, that you see the two things many people come looking for under this name: the funerary monument of Queen Maria of Hungary, by Tino di Camaino, and in the Gothic choir a fresco cycle with a Last Judgment, begun in 1320 and attributed to the school of Pietro Cavallini, not to his own hand. The diocesan museum also displays around four hundred works by Neapolitan painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Luca Giordano, Massimo Stanzione, Aniello Falcone and Francesco Solimena, and opens Monday to Saturday 9:30-16:30 and Sunday 9:30-14:00.
The good news is that the closing days don’t overlap: on Tuesdays, when the Madre is closed, the diocesan museum is open. If you end up here on that day, the visit isn’t lost, it just shifts by six centuries.
Practical information
Data checked on 10 September 2026 on the museum’s official page. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 8 euros, reduced 4 euros. The ticket covers the site specific rooms, the collection and the current temporary exhibitions: there are no supplements for exhibitions.
Hours. The museum opens Monday and Wednesday to Saturday 10:00-19:30, Sunday 10:00-20:00. Closed on Tuesdays. Last admission is an hour before closing, so 18:30 on weekdays and 19:00 on Sundays.
Guided tours. On weekends, guided tours and workshops are free for anyone with an admission ticket. It’s the reason that, if you can choose, Saturday and Sunday here are worth more than a weekday.
Getting there. The address is via Settembrini 79. By metro line 1 the closest stop is Duomo, and from via Duomo it’s a five minute walk uphill; Museo and Cavour are also about ten minutes away. The area is traffic restricted.
Contacts. The ticket office answers on 081 19528498 and at museomadre@culturatela.com; general information on 081 19978017 and at info@madrenapoli.it.
How much time it takes. An hour for the first floor and the collection. Two hours counting the temporary exhibitions, which take up a significant part of the space.
The rest of Naples
The Madre sits in the upper part of the old centre, and the natural stop before or after is the Cathedral with the treasure of San Gennaro, three minutes on foot along via Duomo. On the same decumanus are the Pio Monte della Misericordia with its Caravaggio, the entrance to Naples Underground and the nativity street of San Gregorio Armeno.
If contemporary art in Naples interests you as a theme and not just a single visit, the second stop isn’t a museum: it’s the art stations of the metro, where the works were commissioned on the same principle as the first floor here, designed for the place they occupy. Kapoor, Kounellis, LeWitt and Paladino turn up here too, and you see them with a public transport ticket.
For the rest, heading down toward Spaccanapoli, there’s the Sansevero Chapel, the majolica cloister of Santa Chiara and the three churches of the lower decumanus with the Donatello at Sant’Angelo a Nilo. For the order of the two days there’s what to see in Naples in 2 days.
Photo credits: courtyard of Palazzo Donnaregina by Amedeo Benestante (CC BY 4.0); nuns’ choir by Mentnafunangann and nave of Donnaregina Vecchia by IlSistemone (both CC BY-SA 4.0). All via Wikimedia Commons.
