Photo: Enzian44 · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Museo etnografico siciliano Giuseppe Pitrè

Museum of Sicilian popular traditions founded in 1909 by Giuseppe Pitrè, in the Favorita park in Palermo.

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About the museum

The museum was founded in 1909 by the Sicilian scholar Giuseppe Pitrè to document the customs, costumes, beliefs and traditions of the Sicilian people, and it is owned by the Comune di Palermo. The first seat was a group of four rooms in the Collegio dell’Assunta in Via Maqueda, where the material could not be arranged according to the founder’s idea.

After Pitrè’s death in 1916 the collections remained inaccessible for a long time. In 1935 Giuseppe Cocchiara reorganised them and moved them to one of the buildings adjoining the Palazzina Cinese, in the Favorita park, where the main seat is; a new display was inaugurated in 2014. Since 2007 a second seat has displayed, on the piano nobile of Palazzo Tarallo in Via delle Pergole, in the Albergheria district, 18th-century sedan chairs and furniture, the theatre of the Opera dei Pupi, the “stanza della memoria” (room of memory) dedicated to Pitrè, and part of the library.

The collections comprise about 4,000 objects arranged in some twenty sections: the house, weaving, furnishings and trousseaux, costumes, ceramics, the art of shepherds, hunting and fishing, agriculture, crafts, the Sicilian cart, the puppets, the Festino cart, painting on glass, presepi, ex voto and festive sweets. One room reconstructs the great kitchen of the Bourbons. The museum is surrounded by a garden that can be visited free of charge.