CArtEC – Cava Arte Contemporanea – is housed in the grottoes adjacent to the Municipal Art Gallery.
These are artificial caves made in medieval times for the extraction of stone blocks with which the older city was built.
During World War II they were used as air-raid shelters and, immediately after the war and until the 1960s, as housing for the many homeless people who lost their homes during the terrible bombings of 1943.
The large and interconnected rooms were returned to the City in December 2015, recovered with a conservative intervention that acted without changing in any way the nature of the place, its typological and structural elements.
The re-functionalization of the spaces was, in fact, entrusted to the choice of totally reversible furnishings that punctuate the path without breaking the fluid continuity of the hypogean environments.
Wood, steel and glass adapt their essence to the nature of the place, autonomous, almost suspended from the rocky envelope that becomes the natural extension of the exhibition spaces of the Civic Museums (the works of the Civic Art Collection also found shelter here during the war).
