The Antica Spezieria di San Giovanni in Parma, which became part of the Pilotta monumental complex circuit last June, will be returned to visitors entirely restored from Sunday 20 October, with the opening of four new spaces in addition to the four rooms already visitable.
Various structural interventions and interventions were carried out on the collection, made up of artistic artefacts and work tools, which on the one hand brought the building back to its original conformation, with the reopening of the door onto the Monastery, and on the other brought its safety and accessibility to modern standards. In particular, the restoration involved walls, floors, glass, fixtures, marble, with a chemical-physical investigation of all the systems and a safety measures of the entire wall structure, adequate to resist seismic stress. Just as accessibility is now calibrated to break down physical and cognitive barriers, facilitating entry, movement and use of the 400 square meters of exhibition space and the collection, also through tactile supports for the visually impaired and olfactory corners designed for an experience multisensory. Even the preserved objects, from wooden artefacts to paintings, from mortars to stills, from ceramic material to books, have been restored and where possible digitised.
The exhibition itinerary, which already included the Hall of Fire, the Hall of Mortars, the Hall of Sirens and the Hall of the Well or of the Alembics, is now completed with three other rooms, the Hall of History, the Hall of the Rule, the Hall of Poisons or of the Book, and with the Entrance Corridor or of the Monk. Here the ancient opening onto the Cloister has been restored, a symbolic and practical point of contact with the Monastery, and by extension with the origins of the pharmacy, whose thousand-year history began before the year one thousand and has experienced evolutions and changes over the centuries. The restoration and setup of the new museum spaces of the Spezieria was also possible thanks to the contribution of the Cariparma Foundation and the “Parma, io ci sto!” Association.
Located in the heart of the city, inside the Benedictine abbey of San Giovanni Evangelista, the former historic pharmacy was already present inside the Monastery since its foundation in 981, even if the first news of its existence leaked to exterior in 1201, the year of its opening to the public. In addition to the Hospital of San Giovanni, annexed to the Monastery, the Spezieria was the first to also serve the city hospitals, namely the Rodolfo Tanzi and, subsequently, the San Giovanni Gerosolimitano. This guaranteed it considerable growth, which in the fifteenth century translated into continuous expansions, with the creation of a vast laboratory along the current Borgo Pipa, acquiring between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the architectural structure that it would keep unchanged for centuries. If on the one hand, as a monastic pharmacy, access to customers was prohibited, on the other, the influence of the apothecary on the city economy in the eighteenth century forced the Benedictines to entrust the business to private lay people. Changes in ownership followed one another throughout the century and beyond, until the definitive closure of the business in 1897 and its transformation into a museum.
With the transition to the Superintendence of Artistic and Historical Heritage in 1968, the structure became an increasingly integral part of the city’s museographic system, until its inclusion, in June 2024, within the museum circuit of the Pilotta monumental complex.