Civic Museums of Palazzo d’Avalos

The Civic Museums of the City of Vasto are hosted in the wide halls of the d’Avalos Palace, the Neapolitan garden of which opens out to the view of the fantastic landscape of the Vasto gulf. As Luigi Marchesani so greatly wished, the Archaeological Museum opened in 1849. It is the Archaeological Museum is the oldest public Museum in Abruzzo, as well as one of the most important. The materials represent a complex of homogeneous and chronologically stratified evidences of the history of the old city of Histonium and its territory from the Iron Age to the early Middle Ages. There are also sarcophagi, sculptures, jewels, amphorae, coins (coined between the 3rd and 5th centuries A.C.), besides a wonderful mosaic floor coming from the ancient thermal baths of Histonium dating back to the 1st century A.D. portraying fish, sea monsters and floral patterns.
Among the precious artworks of note are the valuable funeral dowries of the several tombs excavated in 1912-1914 in the necropolis along the Tratturo, datable between the 6th and 3rd Centuries B.C., and the two little bronze plates with inscriptions in Oscan language, coming from the Frentani sanctuary in the nearby site of Punta Penna. Also particularly interesting are the very rich epigraphic collections containing funeral epigraphs, at times with peculiar and curious texts carefully explained, big monumental epigraphs testifying to important public works, a monumental double sarcophagus for P. Paquio Sceva and his wife Flavia, and a milestone of the late archaic period from Punta Penna, relating to the Roman road running tracing the Adriatic seashore.
The Art Gallery contains a sector dedicated to contemporary painting and in particular to that of the 19th century, where one can admire works of important Vasto artists such as the Palizzi brothers, leading figures of the 19th-century Neapolitan school, Valerico Laccetti, Gabriele Smargiassi and Giulio Cesare de Litiis, and other Abruzzo painters such as Francesco Paolo Michetti and Giulio Aristide Santoro.
The Gallery of Modern Art was created instead as the natural extension of the exhibition called “Mediterranea,” which in 2002 unveiled to the public the works given by the Paglione partners to the Municipality of Vasto.
The Costume Museum contains a collection of paintings portraying traditional costumes and precious Abruzzo clothes dating back from the beginning of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century.