Santa Maria della Scala

Presentation

Santa Maria della Scala, one of Europe’s oldest hospitals, terminated its health-service functions some years ago and became (and in part still is) the object of an important renovation operation for museum and cultural purposes. This large complex, located in the heart of Siena, in front of the Cathedral, conserves extraordinarily intact testimonials of thousands of years of history, revealing a path that runs uninterruptedly from the Etruscan and Roman age, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to us.

It is a unique synthesis, blending images of Etruscan civilization, tired pilgrims, wanderers and the sick, noble gentlemen, Byzantine emperors, abandoned children and praying monks. And in the tracks of so many suggestions we find monumental rooms, narrow corridors, brightly coloured frescoes with stories of lives lived, dark crypts, labyrinthine tunnels dug into tufaceous rock and immense spaces with vaulted brick ceilings.

Santa Maria della Scala thus does not lend itself to a univocal reading, and even though great artists have left precious and rare testimonies within it, the vast edifice (350,000,000 cubic metres) is above all a splendid synthesis of the city and its history. And this is precisely its particularity: it is a container in which architecture, works of art and history tell of a life that has continued on without interruption for a thousand years.