[1] The museum was built by the will of the Marquis Luigi Malaspina di Sannazzaro, an enlightened artist (1754/1835), who donated his art collections to the municipality on his death.

The arcades on the ground floor of the castle house the Lapidarium made up of stelae, sarcophagi, funerary and votive altars, epigraphs, capitals, colonnems and Roman milestones.

[5] In the second room is exhibited the Egyptian collection, donated by the Marquis Malaspina di Sannazzaro (who bought it from Giuseppe Nizzoli, chancellor of the Austrian consulate in Alexandria between 1818 and 1828), consisting of about 150 artifacts.

At the same time there is also a funerary epigraph in marble and written in Greek by a Syriac family, coming from the church of San Giovanni in Borgo and some fragments of tiles bearing the bishop Crispinus II (521- 541) stamp, proof of the presence of kilns in the city even after the end of the Roman world.

Witnesses of Lombard sculpture at the time of King Liutprand are the well-known plutei of Theodota,[12] which depict the tree of life between winged dragons and a chalice flanked by peacocks, and the fragment of pluteus with a lamb's head from the former Royal Palace of Corteolona, while always linked to the royal past of Pavia is the inscription of the sarcophagus of Queen Ada (wife of King Hugh of Italy, who died in 931 and buried in the church of San Gervasio and Protasio) and the sella plicatilis, a folding chair of Carolingian or Ottonian art in iron coated with silver and gilded copper, a rare specimen (very few European museums retain furnishings from that era and almost none of them reach the quality of the Pavia specimen) due to its technical complexity and refined decoration.

In particular, the monumental portals of the two churches (room VIII and X), numerous capitals and a portion of the wall with white, green and blue glazed bricks from Santa Maria del Popolo (11th Century) are exhibited, among the oldest Italian (and European) examples of majolica.

The floor mosaic of the central nave adapts the theme of a large wheel included within a frame bordered by ribbon, herringbone and, laterally, with geometric motifs.

The mosaic of the right aisle instead depicts scenes of the martyrdom of Saint Eustace and is also notable for the iconographic rarity (the saint's passion is depicted in the capitals of the church of Vezelay in Burgundy, in the cloister of Monreale, but this one in Pavia would be the only mosaic example).Of particular interest is a homogeneous series of capitals in red Verona marble decorated with foliage and heads, of fine workmanship and expression of Lombard late Gothic sculpture (late 14th century).

The perpetual demolitions and demolitions of the urban building fabric have given the museum an impressive number of architectural terracottas; therefore the individual pieces are indicative of their relevance to string courses, windows, portals and, according to the style requirements, to a renewal that the city experienced above all in the Visconti and Sforza age, when alongside the large public buildings and noble palaces, even the small owners came updating their homes to the new taste.

Beyond the possible restitution of some context, the same quality is a significant datum of a paleo-industrial production that the documented existence of kilns, starting from the first half of the fourteenth century, can assign to Pavia.

In particular, the Folperti slab must have constituted the lid of the sarcophagus of a more complex monument, while the epigraph of Francesco da Brossano is characterized by the refinement of the Gothic characters, elegantly engraved and gilded, accompanying the importance of the poetic text, in elegiac couplets, dictated by Petrarch himself.

[18] Rich is also the Renaissance Section which preserves works of art from the Certosa construction site (in particular many terracotta sculptures) and sculptural testimonies attributed to the school of Giovanni Antonio Amadeo and Cristoforo and Antonio Mantegazza, active in the decoration of the Certosa facade: including the panel with the Annunciation from the monastery of San Salvatore, with evident Bramante influences, and the aedicule with the Pietà, once stuck in the outer wall of the San Matteo Hospital[19] or the telamon bust attributed to Annibale Fontana.

In 2001 the art gallery was enriched by the legacy of the Pavia collectors Carla and Giulio Morone, the donation consists of 66 works, including paintings, pastels and drawings by Italian artists such as Federico Zandomeneghi, Giovanni Segantini, Plino Nomellini, Giuseppe de Nittis, Luigi Conconi, Daniele Ranzoni, Tranquillo Cremona, Giovanni Boldini, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Carlo Fornara, Oreste Albertini and many others.