Our Archaeological Museum presents one of the most significant collections of glass in northern Italy, many of which come from Lomellina. These are glass mainly made with free blowing or hot worked and characterized by the great variety of colors. One of the main pieces of the collection is undoubtedly the light blue glass bowl exhibited in room II, blown into a mold and engraved with the signature in Greek characters "Ennione", a very active glassmaker towards the end of the 1st century. A.D. The relief decoration is arranged in two horizontal bands: the upper one has a vine branch, the lower one has an ivy branch. The latest restoration involved the removal of the additions made in the second half of the twentieth century, having yellowed and therefore becoming visually unpleasant. The restoration produced an excellent result, making the piece perfectly suitable for the exhibition “Made by Ennion, Master of Roman Glass” held between 2014 and 2016 in New York.

Plate B57, twin of B55, also comes from the Monastery of Santa Maria Teodote or della Pusterla, the current Episcopal Seminary of Pavia. The slab, decorated in the style of the lutprandean renaissance (712-44), has a decorative motif in a band composed of vegetable spirals, depicting images of bunches of grapes and birds, as well as a twelve-petal rosette. In the central field two peacocks appear in heraldic position drinking from a cantharos (surmounted by a cross) with handles, on the sides of which there are a flower and a disk with concentric circles. It is significant that of the two pictorial layers brought to light by the excavations of the monastic church, the oldest is a velum with painted figures of animals, among which that of a peacock stands out. In this way it is ideally possible to reconnect the two slabs to a more complex decorative program through the use of decorative elements taken from the ornamental repertoire of the Lombard sculptural tradition of the eighth century.

In the archaeological section of our castle there is this precious slab, known by the name "Lastra di Senatore". The sculpture is engraved with two letters: a "B" and an "M". Also in the central part there are writings, difficult to interpret, enclosed by a clypeus. Scholars believe that the upper letters indicate "B (ene) m (erenti)" and the monogram "Senatori". The frame that highlights the margin is curious: the two vertical bands form an intertwining of circular and rhomboidal meshes, which enclose smaller meshes; the two horizontal bands instead constitute a branch formed by a branch that forks creating an ace of spades, which in turn encloses a stylized leaf. It also highlights the graceful ornamental motif of the palmettes present in the first letter at the top and in one of the letters in the monogram: these are in fact the symbol of martyrdom par excellence. The tombstone is traditionally recognized as coming from the burial of Senator, who founded in 714 the monastery of Saints Maria and Aureliano, called precisely of Senatore. However, in recent years the hypothesis has emerged that it may rather constitute the funeral seal of the tomb of Severino Boethius, who died between 524 and about 526. This hypothesis anticipates its chronology by almost two centuries, but this is coherent on a stylistic-formal level

This slab, together with its twin B 57, comes from the Monastery of Santa Maria Teodote or della Pusterla, currently the Episcopal Seminary of Pavia, where they constituted the presbyterial barrier, that is the enclosure that divided the part of the church reserved for the bishop and the clergy from that of the faithful. Critics assign it to the period of the Lombard king Liutprando (712-744). According to the typically aniconic taste of Lombard art, the subjects represented are plant and animal motifs: the central field houses a composition with the depiction of two sea monsters with lion heads, wings and anguiform tail, placed in front of a tree of life , an iconographic motif of Iranian-Persian tradition, which arrived in the West thanks to commercial and artistic exchanges with Constantinople. In the lower corners there are two small figures of dolphins. The two-dimensional articulation of the decorative elements prevails in the slab. Animals and the tree of life are characterized by sharp profiles. The series of coils in the tails of sea monsters, represented as superimposed disks, escapes this approach. The progressive anthropomorphic decorative loss towards a symbolic predilection of phytomorphic and zoomorphic elements, present in the slab, identifies the direction in which subsequent medieval art will develop.