The origin of the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, unveiled in 1986 in the ancient Episcopal seminary, lies in a museum project that had been started a few years earlier, in the attempt to let people see and understand the development of art in Pisa, in particular its Medieval sculpture, born during the centuries-old building of the square, whose masterpieces had been scattered in different places until then. The most prestigious sculptures that had been taken from the monuments during the restoration works that they underwent over the centuries – especially the drastic ones of the nineteenth century – had actually been relocated to the Museo Civico, which was then named Museo Nazionale di San Matteo; other works, recognised and studied in the early twentieth century, had been lost again in the storerooms of the Opera after the war; other works, mixed with works from other parts of the town, were in the Monumental Cemetery, the last and by now accidental remains of the unusual museum that Carlo Lasinio had set up there in the early nineteenth century, soon largely dismembered.
After a thorough examination of every piece, decisions were taken on where to exhibit them, and all the sculptures that turned out to have originally come from the buildings of the square were moved to the new museum. Next to them is the Treasure of the Cathedral – silverware and church vestments, books of Liturgy – and a brief overview of its fixed furnishings while a special section accommodates the Egyptian, Estruscan and Roman antiques that in the early nineteenth century were exhibited in the galleries of the Cemetery.
Designed as the residence of the canons of the Cathedral, who resided there from the end of the XII century until the early XVII century, the building is composed of two L-shaped rectangular brick bodies built around a cloister, still visible despite the adjustments that had to be made to convert it into a Diocesan Seminary, which was created by bishop Carlo Antonio Dal Pozzo (1582-1607). He commissioned the current façade, of obvious Florentine influence, the windows and the two symmetrical doors, edged in pietra serena, standing out on its pale plaster. When the seminary was moved in 1784, the building was bought by a family: sold to the scholar and art collector Giovanni Rosini, for a short time it hosted the Local Academy of Fine Arts, then it went back to its religious purpose in 1887, when it was converted into a female monastery: the distorting changes made to the building were removed by the latest restoration, which began when the Opera bought it in 1979 to convert it into a museum.
