User:Giorgia Carone/Museum of the gypsotheque of the Norman-Swabian Castle (Bari)

The museum of the gipsoteca of the Norman-Swabian castle of Bari is a museum that collects plaster casts, reproductions of the most famous Apulian monuments from the period between the Middle Ages and the beginning of the 20th century. The museum is housed in the castello normanno-svevo of Bari.

Storia
The plaster casts were made by Pasquale Duretti and Mario Sabatelli in 1911 on the occasion of the ethnographic exhibition in Rome, wanted for the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy, to set up the regional pavilion of Puglia

The collection includes 130 plaster casts reproductions of capitals, sculptural decorations, portals, archivolts of the most representative religious and civil monuments of Puglia, with particular attention to the Romanesque and the Norman-Swabian age.

Among the most important casts are the reproductions of the lion door, shelves, capitals, the sphinx of the main portal and the chair of Abbot Elia of the basilica of San Nicola, sculptural fragments and shelves of the apse window of the cathedral, slabs and capitals of the 'ambo and lunette of the concathedral of Bitonto, fragments of the portal, capitals of the crypt and bas-relief of the door of the cathedral of Trani, a lunette from the portal of the cathedral of Altamura, corbels and capitals of Castel del Monte, episcopal chair of the sanctuary of Monte Sant' Angelo and the remains of the entrance arch of the lost Federiciano palace in Foggia.

At the end of the Rome exhibition in December 1911, the casts were brought back to Bari and kept in the provincial archaeological museum. In 1949 the plaster casts were transferred to two rooms on the ground floor of the Norman-Swabian castle where the plaster cast gallery began to be set up, of which the Superintendency accepted the direction and management of the collection while the province of Bari retained ownership, which was not inaugurated until 2011 due to plant adaptation works that began in the 1960s

The plaster cast gallery was finally able to reopen only in 2011, one hundred years after the creation of the plaster casts, in the rooms of the castle to which a third had been added. On that occasion the casts underwent a restoration and were displayed with a logic of a topographical nature, according to the area of ​​origin

Descrizione
The museum is currently managed by the regional directorate of Puglia museums under the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

The museum is accessed from the central courtyard of the castle, under the monumental staircase. In the first room there are the casts that reproduce works from Bari and its province, in the second those relating to the rest of Puglia. In the second room in particular there are materials that illustrate the historical and social changes that characterized Bari starting from the Byzantine era (VI century AD) until the end of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

The Sveva room instead offers a multimedia itinerary that includes some films that reconstruct the cultural climate of the 1911 exhibition, as well as a recording of the inauguration of the event by King Vittorio Emanuele II and his wife Elena