20 December 2025 brought to an end the longest removal in the recent history of Italian museums: the national museum of Abruzzo returned inside the Spanish fort of L’Aquila, sixteen years after the earthquake had driven it out into a former slaughterhouse on the edge of the centre.
Six months later, on 8 June 2026, in one of the fourteen new rooms, a painting was unveiled that nobody expected to find in Abruzzo: the Ecce Homo by Antonello da Messina, bought by the Italian state at Sotheby’s for almost fifteen million dollars.
These are the two reasons why this museum, visited for years out of duty, is today the most interesting stop in the city.
Careful: the museum occupies one wing of the castle out of four. The other three are still being restored, and the archaeological section and everything after the sixteenth century have stayed outside with them. Anyone arriving expecting the whole museum will be disappointed; anyone who knows what to look for will not.
Careful, second point: almost every photograph in circulation, including those in this article, predates the new display and shows the works where they used to be. The objects are the same, the rooms are not.
The fortress the city paid for as a fine
Why would a city build a fortress aimed at itself? Because it did not choose to. In 1527 L’Aquila rebelled against the Spanish and sided with the French, and it lost. The punishment was not a sacking: it was a building site. The capital of Molise has the 15th-century variant of the same story, and I tell it in Campobasso, the Monforte Castle and the archaeological museum. Perugia found itself in the same position thirteen years later, and the fortress Paul III built over it is walked through underground today: I tell it in underground Perugia. The viceroy of Naples ordered a fort at the top of the city and loaded the cost onto the citizens, who had to pay one hundred thousand ducats a year. And the fort was not built to defend the city: it was built to control it, with its cannon pointed inwards, at the streets.
Work began in 1534 to a design by Pedro Luis Escrivà, a military engineer from Valencia, and went on until 1567, under Charles V and his successors. The result is considered one of the most intact achievements of early modern military architecture in Italy.
And here lies the twist that makes the fort a piece of history and not just of masonry: it was never used in any significant military action. The city paid for thirty-three years for a war machine that never fired, and to keep paying it went as far as selling the silver case that held the body of Saint Bernardino, the one in the basilica in the centre; in 1567 it asked the Spanish to stop the works because it could no longer afford them. The fort, meanwhile, served as the residence of the Spanish governor, then as barracks for French troops, then, in the Second World War, as the German occupier’s command post and prison. Restored in 1951, it became a museum.
How it is built: four bastions, a dry moat, a bridge
The walk round the outside is free and takes twenty minutes, and it is worth doing before you go in, because the fort makes sense from outside.
The plan is a square one hundred and thirty metres to a side, with a lance-headed bastion at each of the four corners. The walls are scarped, sloping outwards at the base, and they go from about ten metres thick at the bottom to five at the top: the slope served to bounce cannonballs upwards rather than absorb them head on.
A moat runs around it, and the thing to notice is that it was never flooded: it is a dry moat, grassed over today, and you cross it on a stone bridge. Looking down into the moat you can see the embrasures of the casemates, the positions from which the floor of the moat itself would have been swept had an attacker got that far. Each bastion had its own cisterns, so that it could hold out even if the rest fell.
On top of the bastions today you will notice metal ties sticking out: these are the supports fitted after 2009, and they are no part of the sixteenth-century design.
What you actually see inside the museum today
The MuNDA occupies the south-east quarter of the castle, restored with forty million euros in a project completed in November 2024, plus eight million for the new display. That comes to fourteen rooms on two floors and about one hundred works, and the selection is declared: from the ninth to the sixteenth century.
The order of the visit runs like this. The ground floor tells the story of the castle, and holds the piece every local comes back to see. The upper floors hold medieval and Renaissance art from Abruzzo: wooden sculpture, Madonnas, panel paintings, and the two pictures the newspapers write about.
What you will not find, and it is fair to know in advance: the archaeological section and all the collections from the late sixteenth century onwards, which remain in the temporary premises at Borgo Rivera and can only be seen on the special visits the museum organises.
The castle mammoth
The piece the museum leads with is not a painting: it is a skeleton of Mammuthus meridionalis mounted standing, with tusks that curl forward for nearly the whole length of the animal.
The story of its discovery is the best this museum has. On 25 March 1954, in a clay pit at Madonna della Strada, near Scoppito, a few kilometres from the city, workmen struck something hard. It was an adult male that lived 1.3 million years ago, and it is one of the largest and most complete mammoth skeletons in Europe. It has been in the fort since 1960, and that is where the name the city uses comes from, the castle mammoth.
It stands in the east bastion, in a room of its own on the ground floor, and with the reopening of the castle it became visible again after sixteen years away. In the photograph you can see visitors walking past it: they are there to give the scale, because the animal is a good deal taller than they are.
Beside the skeleton a loose tusk is displayed on a trestle, and that one can be examined close up: it is the only way to grasp how thick it is at the base.
The Beffi Triptych, which is named after a mistake
The museum’s painted masterpiece is a tempera on panel from the early fifteenth century, around 1410, and the first thing to know is a lesson about the names of works of art: it is called the Beffi Triptych, but it does not come from Beffi.
The panel was painted for the church of Santa Maria del Ponte at Tione degli Abruzzi, in the middle Aterno valley, the valley that links L’Aquila to Sulmona. Beffi is a fortified village nearby, and an old mistaken attribution of provenance stuck that name to the work: art historians accepted it, wrote a century of scholarship under it, and now the name is what it is and will not be changed. The painter is anonymous, known by convention as the Master of the Beffi Triptych; a recent proposal identifies him as a Leonardo from Teramo.
Look at it panel by panel, because they hold three different stories.
At the centre, the Madonna enthroned with the Child: a deep blue mantle edged in gold over a red dress, two angels in pink drawing back the cloth of honour, an incised gold ground.
On the left, a Nativity laid out vertically like a serial narrative. At the bottom the Virgin in blue adoring the Child in the manger, the ox and the ass, Saint Joseph seated in yellow; above, the announcement to the shepherds, with a red-winged angel flying across a starry sky. And at the foot of the panel, the scene almost nobody looks at: the washing of the newborn, with two women and a basin, and a donor kneeling in dark blue.
On the right, two registers. Above, the Coronation of the Virgin inside a blue mandorla full of angels; below, the Dormition, with the apostles round the bed and Christ holding his mother’s soul in the form of a small white figure, between two red seraphim.
Antonello’s Ecce Homo, and the problem of showing a panel painted on both sides
In February 2026 the Italian state bought at Sotheby’s in New York, for 14,900,000 dollars, about twelve and a half million euros, a small panel some twenty centimetres by fourteen by Antonello da Messina. After a showing at the Senate in Rome and examination by the central institute for restoration, the painting was unveiled here on 8 June 2026.
The feature that makes it a unique case is that it is painted on both sides, and in the photograph you can see the two faces side by side.
On the recto, a Christ crowned with thorns at half length behind a parapet: a black ground, a knotted rope around the neck, the mouth slightly open, the eyes reddened and wet, and on the parapet a cartellino with an inscription. It is one of the most direct images the fifteenth century produced: there is no narrative around it, only a face at conversational distance.
On the verso, a landscape of yellow rocks with an inlet of sea beyond, a boat and a distant shore. At the centre a kneeling figure, arms raised towards a small crucifix propped against the rock face; on the ground a red book, and on the right a small wooden desk. The sources identify the scene as a penitent Saint Jerome. The surface is crossed by dense craquelure, visible to the naked eye even in reproduction.
What problem does a painting like this pose for whoever has to display it? A real one: a panel painted on both sides cannot be hung on a wall without hiding half the work. It is the only known painting by Antonello in this condition, and the choice made in the display is part of what you go to see.
The other versions of this iconography are at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, at Palazzo Spinola in Genoa and at the Collegio Alberoni in Piacenza: this was the only one left in private hands, having passed through a Spanish collection in the early twentieth century and then a New York gallery. If this painter interests you, the Civic Art Gallery of Reggio Calabria holds his Saint Jerome, the same subject as the verso of this panel, painted on a single face.
Why a Sicilian Antonello is in Abruzzo
Everyone asks, and there are two answers.
The first is political: the Ministry of Culture chose L’Aquila as the permanent destination in the year the city is Italian Capital of Culture, as an act of reparation towards a city that had lost everything. The museum had only just reopened and it needed a reason to bring people in.
The second is that the choice is contested. Sicily is laying claim to the painting, arguing that the natural home of an Antonello is his own land. And one episode has handed arguments to the critics of the museum’s management: between 21 and 26 August 2026 the panel left the museum to be shown at the Rimini Meeting, at a trade fair, eight days in all counting the journey, in precisely the month when the people of L’Aquila had planned to go and see it.
The painting is back, and it is the reason why the verification date matters more than usual in this article: a work that travels is a work you might not find. If you are coming for it, telephone first.
What is left at Borgo Rivera
The former slaughterhouse in via Pentima, in Borgo Rivera, a few steps from the fountain of the 99 spouts, was the national museum of Abruzzo for sixteen years. Today it holds what does not fit in the castle: the archaeological section and the collections from the late sixteenth century onwards.
It is not a closed site, but it is not an open one either: it can be visited only on the special openings organised by the museum. The declared plan is to turn it into a regional store with a restoration laboratory and exhibition space, in other words a place where the public can watch conservators at work.
If it interests you, ask the castle staff when the next opening is due: there is no fixed calendar.
Practical information
Details checked on 7 September 2026 on the official site of the national museum of Abruzzo, cross-checked against the Ministry of Culture’s announcements on the reopening and on the Ecce Homo. Prices, hours and displays change, and in this museum they change more than elsewhere: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 12 euros during exhibition periods and covers all the rooms of the castle. The group rate is 10 euros a head, for ten to twenty-five people. The reduced ticket costs 2 euros and applies to those aged between 18 and 25. Entry is free for under-18s and the other categories set out in national legislation.
Free days. On the first Sunday of the month admission is free for everyone, and in L’Aquila it is worth taking advantage of, because there is no queue anyway.
Opening hours. The castle opens Tuesday to Sunday from 9:00 to 19:00, with last admission at 18:00. It closes on Monday.
Careful: the MAXXI also closes on Monday, and it stays shut on Tuesday and Wednesday too. Anyone with a single day who happens to come on a Monday sees neither of the city’s two museums.
The museum’s other site. The archaeological park of Amiternum, with its Roman amphitheatre and theatre a few kilometres from the city, belongs to the same museum but has its own ticket and hours. Full price is 5 euros and reduced 2. Until 30 September it can be visited Tuesday to Thursday from 8:30 to 13:30, with the ticket office closing half an hour earlier. From October the hours are being updated on the website.
Getting there. The castle stands at the top of the old town, at its northern end, ten minutes on foot from piazza del Duomo on a gentle climb. Around it lies the Castle park, with its cedars, and the stone bridge is the only way in.
How long it takes. An hour and a quarter for the fourteen rooms. Add twenty minutes for the walk round the moat, which is free and worth it.
The phone number. The museum’s number is 0862 085900; for information and bookings there is 0862 1910019, staffed Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 17:00 and on Saturday from 9:00 to 13:00.
Why climb up to the castle
The MuNDA is not a great museum, and in its present form it is avowedly partial. There are three reasons to put it in the plan, though, and they are three objects: a mammoth skeleton no other Italian museum has in this condition, an early fifteenth-century panel that has carried the wrong name for a century, and an Antonello da Messina that six months ago was in a private collection in New York.
Plus the container, which is the thing that stays with you. A dry moat, four lance-headed bastions and a city that paid for thirty-three years for a fortress that never fired.
The rest of the city is in the guide on what to see in L’Aquila in two days. The basilica of Collemaggio, the basilica of San Bernardino and the MAXXI at Palazzo Ardinghelli belong to the same season of reopenings.
Photographs: the moat of the fort by Gnfrnc dnglsnt (CC BY-SA 4.0), the bastion by Michał Winiarski (CC BY-SA 3.0), the mammoth by Lasacrasillaba (CC BY-SA 3.0), the Beffi Triptych and Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo in the public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.
