The Southern Lagoon Civic Museum, also called St. Francis outside-the-walls Museum of Chioggia is an archaeological and ethnographic museum. It is located in Campo Marconi and set up in the former convent of St. Francis outside-the-walls, at a short distance from St. Mary’s Port, at the end of Canale Vena, one of the main areas of the village. The original building dates back to 1315, while its rebuilding after the destruction during the war of Chioggia between the Serenissima Republic of Venice and the Republic of Genoa, is of 1434. The XIX century (year 1806) dates back the sconsacrazione of the convent that since then has assumed different functions becoming first military warehouse and then, after the first world war, divided into two parts, fruit and vegetable market. In the period after the Second World War has become a shelter for displaced people and then, before being recovered as the Polo Museale, bus depot.
It is divided over three floors, collecting archaeological remains found in Chioggia and in neighboring areas which have as a common denominator the water. On the ground floor there are artifacts from the pre-Roman, Roman and medieval times; the first floor houses the collections of medieval, renaissance and modern; the second floor finally exposes an exhibition on shipbuilding and on the marine starting from the XVIII century. In this last section a room is dedicated to hydraulic technologies of defense adopted in the Roman Imperial period while another documenta commercial activities always in Roman times; other rooms are then dedicated specifically to Sabbadino and to the marine and fisheries and the local shipbuilding. The museum employs documentary material varied as, in addition to the traditional archaeological finds, coins, ceramics, plastics, dioramas, fishing equipment, costumes and photographs.
The museum also houses on the first floor next to the room Sabbadino Cristoforo, the Municipal Historical Archive, open from monday to friday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. There are preserved documents of great historical and cultural heritage dating back, as in the case of Mariegole – illuminated manuscripts treated with sulfuric acid – at 1246, the era of the early Medieval Statutes. The documentation present goes up to the years 1950 documenting the local life in the period after the Second World War.
mailto:info.prenotazionimuseo@chioggia.org