The story
In L'Aquila, the National Museum of Abruzzo currently works from two addresses, and the reason is the earthquake of April 2009. It killed 309 people and badly damaged the city's 16th-century Spanish fortress, the museum's home since 1951.
For six years the collection waited. In December 2015 it reopened in an unlikely building, the former municipal slaughterhouse in Borgo Rivera, beside the Fountain of the 99 Spouts, the city's old stone fountain by the walls. Then in December 2025, after long structural repairs, part of the castle opened again. Its 14 rooms on two floors now hold the medieval and Renaissance core of the collection. There are carved wooden Madonnas from across Abruzzo, painted icons from the 13th century, the Triptych of Beffi, a late-Gothic altarpiece named after the village it came from, and work by Saturnino Gatti, a local painter and sculptor of the early 1500s.
The archaeology and the later paintings remain at the slaughterhouse for now, open for special visits. The castle has also kept its oldest resident, the skeleton of a southern mammoth found in 1954 at a brick works near Scoppito, just west of the city, which still stands in its bastion.
