About us

Why visit the Koper Regional Museum? Three reasons: here you will experience the beauty and glitter of the Renaissance and Venetian periods of Koper, here you will discover charming prehistorical artefacts and here you will enjoy in the beautiful museum garden, the Lapidarium!

The history of the Koper Museum dates back more than a century. The beautiful Belgramoni Tacco Palace houses noble coats of arms, paintings, weapons, Renaissance statues, antique musical instruments, as well as medals and uniforms from the period of recent history and an exhibition about the time of the national liberation struggle and the issue of determining the border between Yugoslavia and Italy that followed.

The beginnings of the establishment of the Koper Museum date back to 1910, when on 1 October the committee for the establishment of the Municipal Museum of History and Art in Koper (Museo Civico di Storia e d’Arte) was constituted, and at the end of October the municipal council adopted a resolution on the establishment of the museum. The museum officially came into being on 18 March 1911, when the municipal council approved its statute and elected the museum management. The museum first received two premises in the former monastery of St. Clare, and after World War I the municipality renovated the Belgramoni-Tacco Palace for museum activities, where the museum is still headquartered today.

After World War II, under the new government, it grew into a Regional Museum of a complex type in 1954, and in 1967 it acquired a regional character and was renamed the Regional Museum of Koper (Museo Regionale di Capodistria). Today, the museum covers the area of ​​seven municipalities, from Piran to Ilirska Bistrica. Since 2009, a unit in Ilirska Bistrica has been operating within the framework of the Regional Museum of Koper, with a permanent exhibition at the Prem Castle.

With the renovation of the Belgramoni Tacco Palace in 1981–1985, new collections were placed in the museum palace, in the dislocated ethnological department on Gramsci Square, and in the mid-1990s, a collection of recent history was also placed in the premises of the former hotel complex next to the museum palace. The main museum building thus presents the archaeological, art, cultural-historical and recent history collections, while the museum gallery in the adjacent building at Kidričeva 23a is intended for occasional own and visiting exhibitions.

The museum hall (piano nobile), the open-air lapidarium and the AS garden are pleasant settings for numerous musical and other events that take place here throughout the year.