Pistoia’s museum network includes interesting exhibition itineraries, which are advantageously distributed over a very small area. This means you can easily visit several museums on the same day and create specific, personalised itineraries. In Cathedral square, the Town Hall and the Old Bishops’ Palace represent the most important centres for Pistoia’s collections, which are completed by the exhibitions in Palazzo Rospigliosi della Ripa del Sale, just a few metres from the square. But let’s proceed in order: the Civic Museum is the city’s main museum that unwinds through the rooms on the first floor, the mezzanine and the second floor of the Town Hall and includes the most important examples of art in Pistoia, from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century.
You can admire works from the city and area’s churches and convents in the museum, as well as the collections donated by the benefactor from Pistoia, Niccolò Puccini. Material from the Giovanni Michelucci Documentation Centre is displayed in the mezzanine, with drawings, plastic models and projects by Pistoia’s famous architect from Pistoia An interesting archaeological itinerary unwinds through the underground passages of the Old Bishops’ Palace, the historical home of the bishop from the 11th to the 18th Century, where you can read the stratigraphy of the excavations and see the many finds that were brought to light during the restoration work carried out on the building.
The building was taken over in the twentieth century, in the seventies, by the Cassa di Risparmio di Pistoia e Pescia, which has assigned many of the restored areas for the treasures of the Cathedral and the Opera di San Jacopo. A visit to the Cathedral Museum will give you the chance to admire precious works by goldsmiths, including the shrine of San Jacopo by Lorenzo Ghiberti, and the rare sacred paraments and liturgical furnishings, as well as being a real journey into the past, through secret places filled with mystery, like the “sagrestia de’ belli arredi” (sacristy of beautiful furnishings), the scene of the shameful theft by Vanni Fucci, which cost the people of Pistoia their everlasting reputation as sacrilegious thieves thanks to Dante Alighieri’s verses (Inf. XXV).

The museum itinerary also includes modern works: amongst which is a Pomona by Marino Marini and the cycle of wall paintings from the villa in Pistoia of Giovanni Boldini, the famous painter from the circle of impressionists. Going down from Cathedral Square along the Ripa del Sale, to the right of the Town Hall, you find the sixteenth-century Palazzo Rospigliosi della Ripa, the site of the Clemente Rospigliosi Museum, the New Diocesan Museum and the Lacework Museum.
The building belonged to a branch of the family, which was only distantly related to Pope Clement IX, but legend has it that during a visit to Pistoia, the pope slept in the great fourposter bed decorated with red damask that dominates one of the rooms of the apartments on the first floor.
Rospigliosi Museum has its own unique charm, because it not only preserves the family’s beautiful seventeenth-century picture gallery, but also the original, precious furnishings and tapestries. And so, walking through the rooms in the building is a little like plunging into the domestic atmosphere of a noble residence about three hundred and fifty years ago. The New Diocesan Museum is set up in the rooms next to those of Rospigliosi Museum and preserves sacred paraments, devotional sculptures, gold and liturgical objects mainly from parish churches in the area of the diocese. Finally, some of the rooms on the ground floor in the same building house the Lacework Museum, paying tribute to the tradition of our province’s prestigious handicraft, where this particular activity has been handed down through the generations and still represents a precious resource for the local economy. And finally, a few minutes walk from Cathedral Square, in Corso Silvano Fedi, you can visit the Marino Marini Foundation Museum, dedicated to the sculptures, graphics and paintings of this illustrious man from Pistoia.
The museum is particularly unique, because it is set up in the old Sant’Antonio Abate or Tau Convent, which has been restored, in keeping with modern times, as a multi-purpose space. The museum also has a café and a small bookshop