Epigraphic museum - Cathedral museums

Entrance fee
Euro 3,00
Reduced ticket Euro 2,00 (students up to 25 years old, people over 65 years old, groups of more than 20 persons, persons of religious orders)
Free entrance: children up to 5 years old, disabled persons and their chaperon, tour guides and interpreters, teachers leading classes, Amei (Museums' Friends Association) associated.

Guided tours
Guided tours must be previously booked, for information pls contact Modenatur 059/220022 or Associazione Arianna 3348518717

The Lapidary Museum of the cathedral preserves 150 works among which sculptures and architectural fragments, all originating from the cathedral and dateable between the 6th and 15th century.
The works were moved several times during the course of the first half of the 20th century until Roberto Salvini, the then curator, in 1956 promoted rearrangement and fitting out in a hall near the present one, subsequently revealed as too cramped.

The route of the visit starts from the section dedicated to reutilisation, which holds the marbles of Roman Age reused in various different ways during the construction of the Roman cathedral. It then continues on the wall in front of the entrance with a series of stone fragments adorned with the typical upper-medieval decorative repertoire of bands, originating from the buildings that came before the current Roman cathedral, also these often reutilised during the construction of the latter.
Next to the fragments is the Arch of San Geminiano, a magnificent marble embedding, placed - maybe already in the Roman Age - above the sarcophagus of the saint, transformed into an altar and removed in the second half of the 19th century.
In the second hall the findings of the Roman Age are exhibited with some reliefs produced by the great workshop of Wiligelmo, like for example, the column-bearing lion originating from the Porta dei Principi and others attributable to the Campionese Masters, a famous family of builders and sculptors from Como Lake, to whom the work of the cathedral was entrusted from the end of the 12th century to the beginning of the 14th century.

The hall is dominated by a series of eight "metopes", large sculptures bearing unusual images of monstrous and fantastic creatures - originally positioned outside the cathedral - on the tops of the diaphragm arches of the central nave, where they are now copies reproduced in 1948 by the sculptor Benito Boccolari.

The route ends with the section of works of the Modern Age, among which some reliefs originating from the destroyed side chapels of the cathedral, and with the inscriptions which constitute an epigraphic corpus of great importance for the history of the Modenese cathedral.

40 audio guides in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish, illustrating the Cathedral, Ghirlandina and Piazza Grande, and also the historical rooms of the Palazzo Comunale and the Duomo Museum, can be rent, accompanied by a folding leaflet with maps of Monuments, at Duomo Museum or at the Tourist Information Office at a price of € 4.00 (two audio guides for the special price of € 6.00).