ilCartastorie - Museo dell'Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli — Attraction in Naples

TLDR: if you don’t speak Italian, they treat you differently and the Caravaggio exhibit is solely in Italian as well

Parts of the museum are English speaking friendly but the main reason for coming was not. When I finished seeing the Caravaggio and went to see the regular bank museum, I was told to wait in the courtyard for what I thought was a guide. I waited fifteen minutes while no one came down. Then a large family of eight people and two dogs strolled into the courtyard and magically a guide appeared within a few minutes. The guide then proceeded to talk to the family and ignore me like I wasn’t there. I walked upstairs with everyone and she spoke very fast in Italian with the large group and talked them through the three exhibits for about seven minutes. As I couldn’t follow, I walked around and then she finally came to me about 15 minutes later and asking if I had questions. I asked her about the documents connecting the Caravaggio to the bank museum and she gave me one sentence about each, lasting about a minute total. Yes maybe English is not native, that I understand, but every time she finished saying something to me, she motioned to the exit and told me it was that way… three times, like she was asking me to leave?!? Why would you need to tell someone where the exit is three times in two minutes? By this time, the family was ahead of me and watching all the exhibits in Italian so I left since I would have to wait for them all to finish before I could watch the few...

Definitely hidden gem of Naples, city of banks. Found randomly while scrolling the city map, this was really surprising museum.

Visited during the month of Caravaggio in Naples in March 2024. One room of the museum was dedicated to the Caravaggio's painting The Taking of Christ (1602) borrowed from National Gallery of Dublin specially for this occasion.

Museum is called ilCartastorie - and includes historical archives of the Banco di Napoli, one of the ancient Neapolitan public banks.

In 330 rooms are preserved approx. 80km books on shelves, that contain 17 million names, hundreds of thousands of payments and detailed accounts of people from Naples and the entire South Italy, from year 1573 to the present day, 450 years of history.

Really creatively made multimedia interactive videos, and shelves itself with hundreds of huge books with a year written on its back are real heaven for history and book lovers.

Specially interesting is a story of "fourth Caravaggio", painting ordered by croatian merchant Nicolo Radolovich from Caravaggio for 200 ducats , which was discovered 30 years ago written in one of the books of the archival transactions. Painting supposed to be delivered in December 1606, as was written, but it is unknown if the painting was even finished, and Caravaggio died in 1610, but the discovery itself is amazing. Recommend to visit to all...

Every time I visited Naples, I discover something new. This museum definitely surprises me. It has the largest collection of bank documents in the world, dating back to 1500s. With the development of trust system (a credit certificate), every transaction was recorded in details in one of these giant record books. As a result, these bank documents recorded the day-to-day life of people from 500 years ago. The museum reconstructed the stories through multimedia. All exhibits have English. My 13-and 9-year old sons found it interesting too. If you happen to be in the area (Metro line 1 Duomo), I strongly recommend you to spend 1-2 hours to visit...