The starting point are the discoveries, intuitions and passion for his island of a polyhedric and passionate character like Ignazio Cerio. It is he who has patiently collected for decades, directly or by acquiring important collections from others, thousands of fundamental testimonies of the geological, natural and human history of Capri.
Significant heritage that his son, engineer Edwin, and the widow of his brother Giorgio, the American painter Mabel Norman, exhibited in a museum dedicated to him in the second postwar period of the 20th century in the family palace, aiming to promote culture on the island. Centro Caprense Ignazio Cerio occupies four rooms of the building located in the immediate vicinity of the little Square, in front of the church of S. Stefano. Edwin himself took care of the first display, designing the beautiful wooden shop windows lined with blue silk. Then, in the nineties of the last century, there was a reorganization of the exhibition of the twenty thousand artifacts and seven collections to which most of them refer. The most ancient fossil findings, found in a land under Villa Jovis, date back 190 million years and are presented in the Geology and Paleontology Room. There are also the remains of large mammals that lived 300 thousand years ago on that strip of land that is still attached to mainland. Bones of bears, deer, wild boars, but also mammoths, rhinos, panthers and hippos from the so called “Fauna of Quisisana” emerging during the excavation of the foundations of the famous Capri hotel.
In the Hall of Prehistory and Protohistory there is the skeleton of the dwarf deer of 70 thousand years ago, coming from the famous prehistoric site of “Grotta delle Felci”, evidence of a time when Capri was already an island. There are also findings of the lower Paleolithic, from the same Quisisana excavation, and those of the first settlements of farmers and breeders of the Neolithic, 7 thousand years ago: locally made vases (Capri culture), shell necklaces, pebbles painted with sacred figures, some metal object. These are coming from Grotta delle Felci, a site also frequented in the Bronze and Iron Ages.
The third is the Classical Archeology Room, with a few pieces from the Greek era and, on the other hand, a great variety of objects from the Roman era, in particular from the 1st century AD, from the imperial villas: ceramic vases of local or imported manufacture, glass artifacts and of metal, including numerous oil lamps.
The exhibition itinerary ends with the Biology Room, dedicated to Capri's fauna and flora. It was Ignazio Cerio who experimented with a system of dredging the seabed that made possible to acquire a lot of organic material to study. Great evidence is given to the test specimens of the rare blue lizard, endemic to the island, while a herbarium collects the 500 species of plants that grow on the island.
In 1960 a library was also created with documents, maps, photographs and an important manuscripts section.
