The story
A visit to the Correale ends in the garden, on a belvedere terrace looking straight out over the Bay of Naples. The villa behind it, the Villa alla Rota, belonged for centuries to the Correale counts of Terranova, an old Sorrento family. The last two brothers, Alfredo and Pompeo, travelled widely and admired the museums that private collectors were founding across Europe in the late 19th century. Their wills, published in 1902, asked that everything they had gathered stay together under the family name. A royal decree created the museum in 1904, and it opened in May 1924.
The 24 rooms on four floors still follow the brothers' tastes. The first floor holds Neapolitan painting from the 16th to the 18th century, Flemish pictures and a Hall of Mirrors. The second is given to Neapolitan still lifes, and the third to porcelain from Meissen, Sèvres, Vienna and Naples's own Capodimonte factory. Clocks, local inlaid woodwork and editions of Torquato Tasso, the Renaissance poet born in Sorrento, fill out the collection. Amedeo Maiuri, the archaeologist who led the digs at Pompeii and Herculaneum, called it the most beautiful provincial museum in Italy, and since 2024 a new archaeological section in the basement has been open too.
