National Museum "Domenico Ridola
Important to reconstruct the origins of the city of Matera and its surroundings is a visit to the National Museum "Domenico Ridola", established in 1911 and dedicated to one of the most illustrious men of the city and located in Via Ridola, near the Sassi of Matera. The doctor and senator Domenico Ridola, passionate about archaeology, started at the end of the 19th century several excavation campaigns that led him to discover some of the most important Paleolithic and Neolithic settlements in the area and to build a very interesting collection of archaeological finds, enriched and updated by the work of the Museum's technicians. Of considerable interest are also the collections concerning the settlements of Magna Graecia, which saw its flowering on the Ionian coast.
National Museum of Medieval and Modern Art of Basilicata - Contemporary Art Section
In a splendid architectural setting, the Museum boasts a large collection of paintings by Carlo Levi, numerous works of the Neapolitan school of the 1600s and 1700s and various wooden and pictorial works from various towns in the province, restored by the Superintendency, as well as periodic exhibitions of great prestige. It is housed inside Palazzo Lanfranchi, near Piazzetta Pascoli, which opens onto a splendid view of the Sassi of Matera.
Museum of Contemporary Sculpture
The MUSMA is the most important Italian museum entirely dedicated to sculpture and the only cave museum in the world.
It illustrates the history of Italian and international art from the end of the 1800s to the present day with a rich corpus of about 500 works including sculptures, ceramics, multiples, jewels, medals, drawings, engravings and art books donated to the Fondazione Zétema, the Museum's promoter, by artists, collectors and gallery owners.
Curated by Giuseppe Appella, MUSMA is housed in the seventeenth-century Palazzo Pomarici, also known as "The Palace of the hundred rooms" because, with a total area of 2900 square meters, consists of 7 vast underground hypogea dug into the tuff, located in 3 large courtyards, and 10 rooms on the main floor.
The visitor can therefore experience an ideal integration, of intense emotional impact, between the secular environments "carved" by man and contemporary sculpture. Temporary exhibitions are set up in the "Hunting Rooms", environments with valuable and refined wall paintings.
Palomba Sculpture Park
The cultural, geological and anthropological landscape of the park, created in an ancient disused quarry near Matera, is among the most interesting in the world. Inside the park, with an extension of about 6 hectares and an exhibition structure of about 1500 square meters, are exposed many contemporary structures-installations of the artist Antonio Paradiso who currently lives and works in Milan and for twenty years has been traveling in the deserts of the Sahara and tropical Africa, making studies of anthropology and paleo-anthropology. Thanks to the excellent acoustics due to the presence of tufa, the local stone used for millennia, inside the park are periodically organized manifestazini unpublished concert as well as exhibitions of sculptors artists of international renown. Open to the public enriches the cultural offer of the city of Sassi.
Ortega House
The project of the House of Ortega, realized by the Zètema Foundation of Matera, was conceived with the dual intent of documenting the presence in Matera of the great Spanish artist Josè Ortega and to encourage the rediscovery and enhancement of the local craft tradition. The exhibition areas host the works realized by Ortega in the 70's, during his stay in Matera, and entrusted by him to the friends of Circolo La Scaletta. They are twenty polychrome bas-reliefs that compose the two narrative series "Passed away" and "Death and birth of the innocents". Ortega executed these panels in collaboration with the master craftsmen of Matera using in an innovative way the ancient technique of papier-mâché and it is precisely these pictorial productions that constitute the thread of the project that wants to highlight the importance of the link between noble art and ancient crafts.
