Next to the sacristy, a new museum dedicated to Pope Benedetto XI was opened in 2019, thanks to the Dominican fathers, to enhance the complex liturgical vestment, historically associated with the Dominican pontiff.
Pope Benedict XI was born in Treviso in 1240 and died in the Dominican convent of Perugia in 1304, where there is the funerary monument, in the chapel in the transept dedicated to him.
The fabric in which two vestment clothes were made (dalmatic and cope) belongs to the type of the “tartaric clothes”, precious silk fabrics with metallic weaves, produced in several centres of the Mongolian Empire, between XIII and XIV century.
These fabrics were already considered as status symbol by the Asiatic sovereigns and they reached Europe, thanks to the Italian mercantile exchanges, becoming a symbol of power at the highest level, both civil and religious, in the Christian West, as well
The decorative repertoire of the “tartaric clothes” is the result of the permeation of the multi-ethnic artisan traditions of the Mongolian Empire, in which the Chinese floral naturalism and the zoomorphic decorations of the ancient Persian and Central Asian repertoire converged, with the presence of Islamic geometries.
This medieval textile treasure, one of the rarest and most important still existing in Europe, has been restored to its original splendour, thanks to the conservative intervention carried out between 2013 and 2017.
The museum also includes precious Italian silk reproductions from the end of the XIII and the beginning of the XIV Century, such as the “diasporo” from Lucca, considered as the Italian gothic reworked version of the “tartaric clothes”.
Finally, the museum contains other artistic memories prior to the XVII Century renovation of the Basilica, such as the frescoes by Cola Petruccioli (Orvieto, about 1360 – Perugia, 1401) which decorated the apse, as further evidence of the splendour of the Dominican Convent from the XIV Century onward.