Macerata Musei

In the civic museums of Macerata hangs a small Madonna and Child by Carlo Crivelli, the Venetian painter who spent most of his working life in the Marche. It is dated 1470, and for a long time scholars assumed it had been painted on wood and later transferred to canvas. A restoration presented in 2022 showed that Crivelli had painted it directly on cloth, which makes it the only canvas by him known today. It probably once formed part of a larger altarpiece in the town's church of Santa Croce.

The museums live mainly in Palazzo Buonaccorsi, a noble family's palace in the old centre, designed in 1697 by Giovan Battista Contini, a pupil of Bernini. Horse-drawn carriages fill the Carriage Museum in the basement rooms. On the first floor, the Aeneid Gallery has a frescoed vault and paintings of the story of Aeneas set into gilded stucco along the walls, and the second floor is given over to modern art.