San Michele Museum in Massa e Cozzile

Established and inaugurated in 2004, the San Michele Museum offers an extraordinary display of liturgical furnishings and priceless documents from the patrimony of the Church of Santa Maria Assunta and the Municipal Historical Archives.

Comprising the chapel and two exhibition halls that were originally part of the Monastery, the museum is located in the main piazza of Massa and adjacent to the architectural complex of the former convent of the Sisters of Saint Francis de Sales, now converted into a civil building yet founded by Marquis Sebastiano Nardini in the second half of the 17ᵗʰ century then expanded and enriched between 1714 and 1718.

The embellishment of the chapel—an integral part of the museum tour—with painted and decorated stucco, likewise dates back to those years. Of particular interest is the canvas, probably attributable to the Bolognese Luigi Crespi, painted with the Presentation of Mary in the Temple. The scene is dominated by the presence of a curvilinear staircase, on which are distributed the figures of two women with children at the base alongside a bearded man, with the Virgin as a child at the top. A stunning gate, the motif of which recalls the grates connecting to the Convent, found in the Chapel, accesses the room housing the wooden choir made in the late 18ᵗʰ century but modernized in the early 1900s.

Significant is the contrast between the seats interspersed with scroll armrests and the neo-Gothic-style decoration above the backs.

In the choir room, precious liturgical vestments can be seen inside display cases, including a silk vestment with gold threads where the repeated motif shows a rock arch and a wooden bridge over a pond fed by a waterfall. Again in the adjoining room are fine sacred furnishings, including a 17ᵗʰ-century monstrance in embossed, chiseled and engraved silver dating back to 1663 and the work of Florentine goldsmith Paolo Laurentini, such as the 1664 Processional Cross in embossed, chiseled, engraved and openwork silver. Of exquisite workmanship is the Reliquary of the Holy Cross made of embossed and engraved silver with gilded decorative elements of refined elegance executed by an unknown Florentine goldsmith in 1722.