The story
For years the Saint Francis in this museum went under the name of Vincenzo da Pavia, a painter active in 16th-century Palermo. In 1946 the art historian Roberto Longhi gave it back to Titian, and a restoration in the early 1950s turned up the Venetian master's signature on the canvas. The saint kneels as rays from a crucifix in the sky mark his hands and feet. The picture is usually dated around 1525, though some scholars place it later.
It hangs in a museum built from one man's collection. Count Agostino Pepoli, a Trapani nobleman, historian and collector, gave his holdings to found it between 1906 and 1908, and the doors opened in 1914 in the former Carmelite convent beside the Sanctuary of the Annunziata, around a cloister first built in the 14th century.
Much of what fills the rooms is the craft Trapani was known for, the carving of red Mediterranean coral. The museum keeps a gilded copper hanging lamp made by the friar Matteo Bavera in 1633 and a crucifix carved from a single piece of coral, along with nativity figures in coral, ivory and alabaster and a marble Saint James the Greater by the Sicilian sculptor Antonello Gagini. Among the relics of Italian unification is the flag of the Lombardo, one of the two steamships that carried Garibaldi's volunteers to Marsala in 1860.
