The Jatta National Archaeological Museum in Ruvo di Puglia, a historic and artistic city in southern Italy, is housed in rooms of Palazzo Jatta and represents the only example in Italy of a nineteenth-century private collection that has remained unaltered from its original museographic concept. The finds preserved in the museum were collected by the archaeologist Giovanni Jatta in the early nineteenth century and his collection was subsequently enriched by his nephew of the same name and was sold to the Italian state in the twentieth century.
Since December 2014 the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities has been managing it through the Apulia Museum Complex, which in December 2019 became the Regional Directorate for Museums.
History of the Jatta collection
The year 1822 brought Ruvo di Puglia on the lips of all the citizens of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. As Giovanni Jatta junior recalls:
"People no longer came to the city to provide themselves with food; because the vendors of bread, wine and camangiari, housed in small tents, provided the necessary in the same countryside."
The fortuitous discovery in 1820 of the vascular heritage present in the subsoil triggered a real treasure hunt and all Ruvo was turned upside down not so much with the interest of setting up a museum or obtaining historically useful information, but with the intention of selling the precious pieces in order to have a personal advantage. Two years later there was a boom in excavations and even the first intellectuals began to take an interest in the finds. In addition to the looting of the ancient necropolis and the market built around the antiques, some noble Houses from Ruvo, such as Caputi, Fenicia, Jatta, Lojodice and others, set up private museums. However, all these Houses, with the exception of the Jatta, then dispersed their archaeological heritage by selling it to private individuals and often abroad, thus causing a dispersion of the stolen historical riches. The exception was represented by the Jatta, especially by Giovanni Jatta senior, magistrate in Naples, who financed various private excavations with the aim of expanding his small collection, mostly composed of coins. Aided by his brother Giulio, in 1844, the year of Giovanni Jatta's death, the collection included about five hundred finds. The heir of this huge patrimony was the nephew Giovannino, son of Giulio Jatta and Giulia Viesti, however in the will the jurist had ordered the heir to give the wealth to the King of the time to keep them in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. But Giovannino, being still too young, was taken over by his mother Giulia who, after her husband also died, decided to ask the Royal Government to leave the Jatta collection in Ruvo to be exhibited in a building used as a residence and museum. In 1848 the king consented to Mrs. Viesti's requests. With Giovanni Jatta junior's coming of age, the collection had already passed to two thousand specimens and it was up to him to arrange all the finds in the four rooms set up for the museum and in a fifth dedicated to jewelry and coins: the room-by-room arrangement of the finds. it has come down to us intact. In the following centuries some pieces discovered and found by Antonio Jatta were added. In 1991, the Jatta private collection was purchased by the State with an indemnity to the family of 9 billion lire due to the expenses incurred by the family over the years for the care of the heritage.
The museum is still arranged according to the wishes of the founders and is divided into four rooms but until the early twentieth century there were five rooms. The fifth room contained a rich medal collection, stolen in 1915 and no longer found.
The exhibits are also arranged in order of importance in fact the first room houses terracotta while the last houses the most important and famous piece, the Talos vase. In 1993 the Jatta Museum was declared national by ministerial decree, while on 11 June of the same year the Museum was reopened to the public. The rooms are accessed through the ancient wooden door in the courtyard.