Ferrara A race against time began to try to complete the work for the construction of the diocesan museum inside the Archbishop’s Palace of the Martyrs of Freedom course. The objective is to inaugurate the restored palace by the Holy Year 2025 and consequently set up the new diocesan museum in those eighteenth-century rooms where Pope John Paul II also stayed in the recent past during his visit to the diocese of Ferrara-Comacchio on 22 and 23 September 1990. The renovation works which were also necessary to reinforce the structure after the 2012 earthquake are well underway, but for four years the last definitive piece to complete the rooms that will house the diocesan museum has been at a standstill . We have been waiting for the opinion of the for a long time Superintendence regarding the intervention project from 700 thousand euros which will conclude the laborious restoration of the episcopate of Corso Martiri della Libertà. Once the final green light arrives, it will take a few months to complete the work. The dream for the Ferrara Curia is to inaugurate the building in the second half of 2025, in full Holy Year. In this regard, there are close contacts with Cremona, the diocese of origin of Monsignor Gian Carlo Perego, to bring an exhibition on the great Renaissance painter to Ferrara Boccaccio Boccaccioborn in Ferrara in 1467 and raised in the shadow of the Officina Ferrarese and died in Cremona in 1525. Next year, to celebrate 500 years since the death of the Renaissance painter, the diocesan museum of Cremona will host an important exhibition dedicated to Boccaccino and, once completed, this will be transferred on loan to the new one Diocesan Museum of Ferrara. A symbolic passage in the sign of unity between Ferrara and Cremona not only for the presence ofArchbishop Perego, but also to celebrate this painter who had great importance in the two Po Valley cities. Among other things, just last December, the diocese of Cremona completed the purchase at auction of an important work by Boccaccio Boccaccino “Two saints, a bishop and the portrait of the client”, for a sum approaching 50 thousand euros and which will make a good show at the exhibition of five hundredth anniversary of the painter. And speaking of anniversaries, this year also marks three hundred years since the completion of the construction of the eighteenth-century archbishop’s palace in Ferrara. Important dates therefore that intersect in the hope of seeing the realization of a project that will increase the exhibition containers in the city. The new diocesan museum will certainly be an added value forr tourists and art lovers. Strongly desired by Monsignor Perego, the diocesan museum in fact – not to be confused with the Cathedral museum in via San Romano which is included in the system of civic museums of ancient art – will have an important historical and cultural value and will also increase the public usability of the archbishop’s palace. Since I’ve been work has begun on the episcope, the offices of the archbishop’s curia were moved to via Cairoli and will remain there following the conclusion of the works. In recent years the archbishop’s palace has also been restored externally with the facades now displaying the original colors of the eighteenth-century construction commissioned by the cardinal Tommaso Ruffo, when in the eighteenth century he had been twice appointed papal legate and also bishop. Now, waiting for the green light from the Superintendence, contacts are also intensifying to enhance from an artistic point of view this new cultural container for the city, located in the center. A space that the diocese is primarily the bishop Perego they want to make the most of it.
