Giuseppe Pitrè Ethnographic Museum

Viale Duca degli Abruzzi, 1 Parco della Favorita - Via delle Pergole, 74

Il Giuseppe Pitrè Sicilian ethnographic museum, founded in 1909 by the Sicilian scholar Giuseppe Pitrè, is a public law body owned by the municipality of Palermo.

It has two offices: one in viale Duca degli Abruzzi, in the Favorita park, and the other in via delle Pergole in the Tarallo palace, in the Albergheria district.

The original site consisted of four rooms inside an old school building in via Maqueda, the college of the Assumption, where, however, the finds could not be sorted according to what was the idea of ​​setting up its founder. After Pitrè's death (1916), the collections remained inaccessible to the public for years, until, in 1935, Giuseppe Cocchiara reorganized and moved the museum to one of the outbuildings of the Casina Cina in the Favorita park.

In this place, the collections have found an appropriate place, with a new subdivision of the finds into sections, responding to criteria of greater scientificity, in compliance with the settings desired at the time - but never concretized - by Pitrè. Cocchiara offered a large account of this arrangement in the work which has as its title: The life and art of the Sicilian people in the Pitrè Museum. At the moment the museum is undergoing restoration work on part of the collections, therefore some rooms are closed to visitors.

The structure consists of a building, in front of an open space, divided by a ground floor which is the seat of the exhibition rooms and a first floor which is the seat of the offices and warehouses. Inside on the right is the ticket office, also a reference for information and any sending to the staff. The Museum is located inside a large and well-kept garden that can be visited free of charge. The Museum is structured as follows: a beam in the center of a crossroads of courtyards, flanked by a flight of 30 rooms.

In 2007 the second seat of the museum was inaugurated, in the historic Tarallo di Ferla - Cottone d'Altamira building, in the Albergheria district.

The permanent exhibition, set up on the noble floor of the building, houses sedan chairs and eighteenth-century furniture, the theater of the Opera dei Pupi, the "memory room", dedicated to Giuseppe Pitrè, and part of the volumes of the library, in particular the collections concerning popular traditions, history and Sicilian architecture.

In 2014 the new exhibition was inaugurated in the main office at the Chinese Palace in the Parco della Favorita in Palermo.