The Sicilian Museum of Art and Popular Traditions of Taormina is a permanent structure that exposes finds of the figurative culture and sicilian arts and crafts from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century.
Fundamental purpose of the Museum is to recover and make enjoyable to the visitors pieces of arts and crafts and objects of use, for example, devotional wooden sculptures, mangers, anthropomorphous ceramics, elaborate pieces of sicilian handcarts, playbills of the puppets work, that constitute a precious testimony of the sicilian popular life and culture.
More than one century ago, Giuseppe Pitrč denounced the risk of losing the historical memory of Sicily, stratified during so many centuries, proposing to the visitors of the National Exposition of Palermo (1891-1892) the examination of the Pavilion for the Sicilian Ethnographic Exhibition. The alarm of Pitrč was justified, because during this century a lot of sicilian works of art were lost. The little ethno-anthropological museums have all risen recently, thanks to the local initiatives, not always supported by scientific standards. The private collections provided for the public lacks, saving fundamental ruins of a rich material culture. These collections constitute today true cultural layers.
The Sicilian Museum of Art and Popular Traditions at Taormina is the consequence of the public and private cooperation. In fact, the protagonists of this initiative were on the one hand the antiquarian Giovanni Panarello (who placed his private collection at disposal of visitors), Franz Riccobono and others, on the other the Mayor of Taormina Mario Bolognari and his town administration who stipulated a free bailment and placed at disposal and equipped the Corvaja Palace.
Finally, today is possible to visit a museum which valorizes the cultural and artistic sicilian history, because the exposed works are able in arousing the emotions tied to the observation of the craftsmen' passion and creativeness, which resume the peculiar and original aspects of the rich sicilian popular culture.
The Museum articulates in three parts: hallway with management and reception, the big fifteenth century room and the fourteenth century room..

Photographic service by Vittorino Puglia.
The data upon the Museum are drawn from Taormina Magazine.