Mandralisca Museum

The Mandralisca Museum in Cefalù, Italy, is an interdisciplinary museum featuring art, archaeological artifacts, and natural history specimens, including the renowned ‘Portrait of an Unknown Man’ by Antonello da Messina.

Planning your visit

The Mandralisca is a nineteenth-century gentleman's collection preserved intact, and it is worth visiting for one painting. Antonello da Messina's Portrait of an Unknown Man, painted around 1465, shows a man with an ambiguous half-smile that has made it among the most reproduced images in Sicily — Antonello was the artist who brought Flemish oil technique into Italian painting, and this is one of his finest surviving portraits.

Baron Enrico Piraino di Mandralisca assembled the rest: Greek and Roman archaeology from the region including an unusual krater showing a tuna seller, a substantial coin collection, and one of the more significant historical shell collections in Italy, malacology having been his particular obsession.

The mixture of fine art, antiquities and natural history in a domestic setting is characteristic of the period and increasingly rare.

Cefalù itself, with its Norman cathedral and mosaics beneath a huge rock, is among the most attractive towns in Sicily. Allow an hour. Bookable options include tours with licensed guides. Current availability is shown below.