Ninety seconds on Rovinj Heritage Museum
Fifteen thousand works sit behind a free door, and the Italian old masters are the part worth the visit. The catch is the timetable: it shuts for four hours in the middle of every day.
Founded in 1954 in a baroque palace on the main square, with old masters, Istrian paintings and a maritime collection across a few rooms. It is also the institution behind the Grisia street exhibition every August. The holdings are modest and the labelling thin, so it repays half an hour and no more.
Go up before you go along. The old masters are the reason the collection matters, Italian work from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century hung in rooms that were domestic before they were galleries. Beside and above them sits the contemporary holding the museum was actually founded to build, Rovinj and Istrian painters of the twentieth century, with the archaeological and ethnographic material that came later. Around fifteen thousand works are held in all, far more than the walls can carry, so what is on show is a rotation rather than the collection.
The museum was set up on 17 March 1954 at the initiative of the town's own visual artists, who wanted somewhere to collect work and mount exhibitions. It has changed name several times and has carried its present one only since 2018. It occupies the Palazzo Califfi, a baroque palace of the seventeenth century on Marshal Tito Square, and it is the institution that has organised the Grisia open-air exhibition every August since 1967.
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