Civic Museum
On April 20, 2000 was opened to the public the Civic Museum of Casamicciola Terme in Villa Comunale of Bellavista. The museum was built in collaboration with the National Seismic Service and represents the first cultural and public structure of Casamicciola since 1883, when the oldest spa town of the island of Ischia, was destroyed by the famous earthquake which represented the first great catastrophe of Italy after the unification. From here the great cultural and scientific interest for that event where the National Seismic Service has dedicated a monumental monograph available in the Museum. The museum, however, also wants to document the “rebirth” of Ischia occurred in the twentieth century with beautiful photos of Alinari Archives and private Archives of Nicola De Luise and Michele Monti and the need for a “third renaissance”, after another tragic event of 24 October 1910 when all the spas were destroyed by a flood. The Museum offers visitors for the first time exhibited in a museum room of the ten oldest maps of the island’s 1500 and 1600 with the monograph of Prof. Dora Niola Buchner, awarded from Accademia dei Lincei in 1986, as once again the ancient art of pottery, which before the spa was the main resource of the country, with its last member, Francesco Mennella. The Civic Museum is connected to the ancient Geophysical Observatory on the hill of Gran Sentinella in 1891 and decommissioned in 1923 and abandoned for far more than 60 years with the recovery of the “seismic basin” invented by Triestine Giulio Grablovitz with which he recorded the earthquake of San Francisco in 1906 and the “room of the Meridian” where climatologist Cristofaro Mennella, our illustrious fellow citizen, studying the climate of the island of Ischia discovering that it is the best one among all those in the Italian thermal resorts.