MAURO STACCIOLI. archive museum, opened in 2024 with the support of the Fondazione Cassa Risparmio di Volterra, is an exhibition space entirely dedicated to the preservation and enhancement of the work of artist Mauro Staccioli.

The exhibition consists of about forty maquettes – among the seventy recovered and restored by the Archive and made over the years by Staccioli to study, verify and present his sculptures – and an interactive touch screen that allows visitors to digitally explore his major works, always set in deep relation to urban places or natural contexts, in Italy and abroad.

The space is also home to the physical archive, digitized by the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History and including documents, notes, drawings, plans, photographs and catalogs, which can also be accessed online through a digital archive.

The Oratorio del Santissimo Crocifisso (Oratory of the Most Holy Crucifix) was built beginning in 1601 to accommodate the brothers of the Congregation of the Bacchettoni, which had been founded in Florence by Blessed Ippolito Galantini a few years earlier. Called to Volterra by Bishop Luca Alamanni in 1599, they set out to lead a life of penance and prayer, devoting themselves particularly to the Christian education of young people: in this oratory they gathered for meetings and moments of prayer, as seen from the wooden seats that occupy the perimeter of the hall. They also put on edifying plays here to ward young people away from common vice. The great vault of the oratory was completely frescoed around 1740 by Florentine painter Pietro Anderlini. In addition to painting formidable architectural devices, he produced a cycle of works on the themes of conversion and death, with quotations of texts from the Bible and the Church Fathers, which were to be subject of the Bacchettoni’s meditation. The niche in the centre of the marble altar – not original and brought here from the cathedral – houses a fourteenth-century stone sculpture depicting the Madonna and Child. In its previous location of the shrine on the corner of the building, there is now a copy.

The former Oratorio del Santissimo Crocifisso has been owned by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Volterra savings bank foundation since 2007.

The archive museum can be visited with Anima di Volterra pass, only on Saturdays and Sundays, during the opening periods of the monuments included in the ticket.