The Regional Museum of Ceramics is one of the most important in Italy for the documentation of ceramic art.
It is housed in a building dating from the 1950s, adapted to the needs of the exhibition and inaugurated as a museum in 1965.
The entrance consists of a 19th-century portico, crowning the so-called “Teatrino” (1792), the 18th-century belvedere below which was created by the architect Natale Bonaiuto, through a sequence of staircases decorated with majolica elements.
The rich collection of finds from all over Sicily illustrates the history of ceramics from prehistoric times to the early 20th century, with particular attention to the artefacts from Caltagirone, a centre of excellence in production since the Muslim conquest of the island.
The works on display have a heterogeneous provenance: some elements have been transferred here from the local Civic Museum, from the collections of the “Luigi Sturzo” State Institute of Art for Ceramics, from other island museums and from the “Russo Perez Collection”, acquired by the Sicilian Region at the end of the 1950s.
