The story
Two Renaissance altarpieces in this museum show who ruled Rimini in the 15th century. Giovanni Bellini's Pietà, from around 1470, shows the dead Christ held up by four small angels. It came to the museum from the Tempio Malatestiano, the Malatesta family church remodelled by Leon Battista Alberti. Vasari wrote that it was painted for Sigismondo Malatesta, lord of the city, while modern historians still debate who commissioned it. After a restoration supported by Venetian Heritage it was shown in Venice and New York, and it returned to Rimini in 2026.
The altarpiece of Saint Vincent Ferrer, by Domenico Ghirlandaio and his workshop, dates from the 1490s. The Spanish preacher stands between Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch, and below them kneel members of the Malatesta family, among them Pandolfo IV, his wife Violante Bentivoglio and his mother Elisabetta Aldobrandini. A few years later, in 1500, Cesare Borgia drove Pandolfo out of Rimini.
The museum occupies a former Jesuit college designed by Alfonso Torreggiani in the mid-18th century, later used as a hospital, and it opened as the city museum in 1990. Its rooms run from Roman inscriptions to the painters of the 14th-century Rimini school. Next door lies the Domus del Chirurgo, the excavated house of a Roman doctor, and the museum displays the more than 150 surgical instruments found there.
