The Museums of Palazzo dei Pio consist of the Palace Museum and the City Museum.
The noble apartment, the most prestigious part of the Palace Museum, combines the decorations frescoed between the mid-15th century and the early 1500s by Giovanni del Sega and Bernardino Loschi, painters of Alberto III Pio, paintings from the museum collection of the same authors and others related to Renaissance culture in Carpi. Another nucleus is the xylographic collection, with the seven sheets of Ugo da Carpi, inventor of the three-wood xylography, wooden matrixes and works by contemporaries. A third nucleus is made up of the picture gallery, with paintings and drawings from the 15th to the 20th century.
It exhibits the materials of the old Civic Museum, founded in 1898 on positivist concepts, collecting alongside the works of art the expressions of the city’s activity: terracottas, scagliole, architectural and decorative fragments of the city, but also relics of the Risorgimento and printed volumes, and then machinery and tools of agricultural activity, then the production of chips up to the more recent textile and clothing industry.
