City Museum of Rimini

The City Museum of Rimini, known in Italian as the Museo della Città "Luigi Tonini," is the civic museum of Rimini, a city in the Emilia-Romagna region of northeastern Italy. Housed in a former Jesuit convent at Via Luigi Tonini 1, the museum stands adjacent to the Chiesa del Suffragio and near the modern Complesso Archeologico della Domus del Chirurgo in Piazza Ferrari, a glass-enclosed structure protecting the ruins of an ancient Roman domus. The institution serves as the principal repository for the city's artistic, archaeological, and historical heritage, spanning from prehistoric times to the twentieth century.

The building that houses the museum was originally designed by Alfonso Torreggiani as a Jesuit seminary and convent, constructed between 1746 and 1755. Following the suppression of the Society of Jesus, the complex passed to the Dominicans and in 1797 became a civic hospital, serving in that capacity for approximately a century and a half. The structure suffered heavy damage from bombardment during the Second World War. After the hospital closed in 1977, the building underwent extensive renovation and restoration directed by architect Pier Luigi Foschi, who subsequently served as museum director from 1985 to 2010. The civic museum opened in 1981 and was formally dedicated to Luigi Tonini, the founder of Rimini's first civic museum, with the dedication taking place in 2015. Since 1990, the building has served as the permanent home of the Museo della Città.

The museum is organized into several distinct sections, with particular strengths in archaeology, medieval art, and Renaissance painting. The archaeological section covers an exceptionally wide chronological range, from prehistory through late antiquity. It begins approximately one million years ago with evidence of Homo erectus on the hill of Covignano, when the area was still lapped by the sea that covered the plain where Rimini would later be built. This prehistoric material includes chipped and polished flint tools, arrowheads, leaf blades, axes, and perforated hammers comparable to finds from the prehistoric site of Ca' Belvedere di Monte Poggiolo in Forlì, as well as early ceramic forms marking the development of agricultural and pastoral economies, and Bronze Age hoards concealed by merchant-smelters. The Roman archaeological collections are especially significant, featuring numerous mosaics of particular beauty and importance, along with materials from the Domus del Chirurgo. The medieval and Renaissance galleries are anchored by the Pinacoteca, Rimini's painting gallery, which holds works from the eleventh through the twentieth centuries. Many paintings in this section belong to the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Rimini. The museum also maintains spaces for temporary exhibitions and cultural events.

The Pinacoteca contains several works of major significance. Giovanni Bellini's Pietà, dated to approximately 1470, represents one of the collection's foremost Renaissance paintings. A large fresco of The Last Judgement is attributed to Giovanni da Rimini, and a Last Supper is attributed to Benedetto Coda. Domenico Ghirlandaio's altarpiece of Saint Vincent Ferrer, begun by Domenico and completed in 1496 by workshop assistants, features figures probably executed by David Ghirlandaio, Sebastiano Mainardi, and Francesco Granacci. Other notable paintings include Domenico Ghirlandaio's Pietà, works by Guercino including Saint Jerome and Saint Anthony of Padua, a seventeenth-century Saint Joseph and Child Jesus after Guido Reni, and paintings by Guido Cagnacci including The Vocation of Saint Matthew, Saint Anthony Abbot with Two Saints, Saint Peter, Saint Francis, Portrait of a Young Priest, and Cleopatra. The museum also holds Paolo Veronese's Altarpiece of San Giuliano, Simone Cantarini's Saint James in Glory, and Marco Marchetti's seven-panel cycle on the History of Publius Cornelius Scipio during the Punic War, originally consisting of eleven panels painted for the Sala Nobile of the Palazzo Marcheselli-Lettimi. Additional works include Jan Baegert's Annunciation and Christ before Pilate, Pomponio Amalteo's Deposition, Nicolò Frangipane's Walk to Calvary, and Francesco Maffei's Scenes of the Apocalypse. The first floor houses a permanent display of works by the local fashion illustrator René Gruau and the Libro dei sogni (Book of Dreams) by Federico Fellini. The cloister courtyard contains a Roman Lapidarium dedicated to Professor Giancarlo Susini, initially curated in 1981, displaying inscriptions from the first to fourth centuries. In 2015, the museum garden was dedicated to the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, murdered at Palmyra in Syria.

The museum occupies the former Jesuit convent and college designed by Alfonso Torreggiani, built between 1746 and 1755. The architectural complex rises at the corner of Via Tonini and Piazza Ferrari, adjacent to the Chiesa del Suffragio, a contemporary structure. The building's transformation from religious and medical use to museum required substantial post-war reconstruction after wartime damage. The nearby Complesso Archeologico della Domus del Chirurgo, inaugurated in 2007, is a modern glass structure built to enclose and display the ruins of a second-century CE Roman house discovered in 1989 during work in Piazza Ferrari. This archaeological complex, located only a few meters from the main museum building, preserves remains of mosaics and frescoes and allows visitors to view continuing excavations.

The City Museum of Rimini is located at Via Luigi Tonini 1, at the corner of Piazza Ferrari in the historic center of Rimini. It is owned and operated as a municipal institution, with its collections and programming managed under the auspices of the city's museum system. The museum's website is https://www.museicomunalirimini.it/musei/museo-della-citta-luigi-tonini. Visitors can access both the main museum complex and the adjacent Domus del Chirurgo archaeological site, the latter through its dedicated glass-enclosed structure. The museum continues to serve as Rimini's principal civic museum, presenting the city's heritage from prehistoric settlement through its Roman flourishing and medieval and Renaissance artistic achievements to modern times.