Museo Adolfo Colosso

The collection, started by Baron Alfonso Colosso and carefully guarded by his children, is one of the rare private historical collections of Puglia and collects materials found in the area in the nineteenth century including epigraphs in the Messapian and Latin languages, sculptural finds and ceramics of various periods .

The collection, kept in Ugento inside Palazzo Colosso in via Messapica 28, is one of the few historical collections in the Puglia region, formed with materials found in Ugento and its territory in the 19th century. The collection was started by Baron Colosso and continued by the late Adolfo Colosso, a passionate lover of homeland history, from which it takes its name. The current home of the Colosso family, located in the heart of the historic center of the city of Ugento, in addition to hosting the important archaeological collection, collects in its rooms of noble and fascinating sixteenth-century architecture a remarkable collection of canvases that can be framed between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries century. The collection boasts 794 artifacts ranging from the sixth century. B.C. to the early Middle Ages, to which are added examples of the modern age such as armor, weapons and cannonballs. The finds dating from the 6th century BC in the Hellenistic period they consist mainly of classes of material from the indigenous ceramic repertoire of the Messapi such as trozzelle, lekanai and reddish brown varnished plates. The ceramics of indigenous production are accompanied by those imported from Greece such as Attic lekythoi. Among the coroplastic creations of particular interest are a clay disc while the terracotta furnishings intended for burial are made up of tintinnabula and some female terracotta. In the collection there are also sculptural finds among which a head with a scopadea imprint from the end of the 4th century can be distinguished. BC and a male torso in stone, a marble fragment depicting the body of an animal and a marble club referable to a colossal statue of Hercules from the Roman age. A Doric capital with an abacus decorated with rosettes stands out in the collection, strictly comparable to the capital on which the statue of the stylite Zeus was placed.