Ralli Museum

Ralli Museum is a single name covering two separate buildings with two separate collections, and that is the first thing to get straight before arriving. The foundation's own pages number them. Ralli 1 opened in October 1993, the third museum of the group after Uruguay and Chile. Ralli 2 opened in April 2007. They share the same grounds, a short walk apart, and both are free.

The foundation puts Ralli 1 at about 9,000 square metres, with five exhibition halls and several octagonal patios, each with a fountain at its centre, under roofs of red terracotta tile. Ralli 2 has four floors, a Moorish exterior, and a central courtyard whose fountain is ringed by twelve stone lions, taken directly from the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra in Granada.

The size of the grounds is stated two ways by the operator and the two do not agree. The Caesarea page says the museums stand in a park of 40,000 square metres. The English About page for the same site calls it a 40 hectare sculpture garden, which would be ten times larger. The Hebrew record gives 40 dunams, which is 40,000 square metres, and that is the reading the smaller figure supports.

Sculpture is spread through the grounds rather than kept indoors: bronze, marble and acrylic, by European and Latin American hands, standing on lawn and gravel between the two buildings.

• Ralli 1: opened 1993, about 9,000 m², five exhibition halls
• Ralli 2: opened 2007, four floors, courtyard copied from the Alhambra
• Grounds: 40,000 m² of lawn, palm, carob, citrus and olive
• Admission: free at both buildings, on the founder's rule

Harry Recanati was born in Salonika in 1918, into the Jewish community of that city. He joined the Tel Aviv bank his father Leon had founded in 1937, took it over at twenty six when Leon died in 1945, and by 1952 it was the second largest bank in Israel. The foundation's account of those seven years records more than forty branches opened and two local banks bought.

He moved to Geneva in 1952 and built private banking businesses in several countries. In 1962 he bought Ralli Brothers of London, a merchant house whose name the museums now carry. Business took him to Latin America repeatedly, and that is where the collecting started.

He bought two small banks from his brothers in 1969 and left banking altogether in 1980. The museums followed in order: Punta del Este in Uruguay in 1988, Santiago de Chile in 1992, Caesarea in 1993, Marbella in 2000, and the second Caesarea building in 2007. He set up the Harry Recanati Foundation so the museums would outlast him, and died in Israel on 18 December 2011.

What they are for is stated rather than implied. The foundation says its main aim is to acquaint the public with contemporary Latin American art, and that the museums are dedicated to the memory of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition and of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, which the Holocaust almost destroyed. Recanati came from that community.

Neither building pretends to be old and neither tries to blend into the Roman surroundings. The Hebrew record names Shaul Skolnik as the architect of the two. Both are done in a Spanish idiom: Ralli 1 in a colonial manner, Ralli 2 in a Moorish one, which is an unusual pair of references to find on the Israeli coast and a deliberate one given what the collections are about.

The device that does the work in both is the patio. Ralli 1 is organised around octagonal courts with a fountain at the centre of each, so the route through the halls keeps returning to open air and planting rather than running along a corridor. Ralli 2 puts one large courtyard at its heart and copies the Alhambra for it, fountain, lions and all.

Around that courtyard stand marble figures of Sephardi thinkers: Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol and Spinoza. Putting them in a Granadan courtyard is the argument the building is making about where that tradition came from and what was done to it.

The planting is part of the design rather than a screen around it. The foundation lists palm, carob, citrus and olive across the grounds, and the sculpture is sited among them.

The permanent display at Ralli 1 comes in three parts. A hall given to Salvador Dali holds a collection of his sculpture, with forty of his works on permanent show. A sculpture patio carries the larger outdoor pieces, among them work by Auguste Rodin, Arman and André Masson. The remaining halls hang paintings and sculpture from the foundation's own holdings, all of them originals from the Ralli collection.

The core of that collection is Latin American and contemporary. The foundation is direct about what it thinks the interest is: work shaped at once by pre-Columbian culture, the Spanish conquest and European painting, which is why so much of it reads as surrealism. It also describes the Ralli holdings as one of the most important collections of contemporary Latin American art in the world, and that is the foundation's claim about itself rather than an outside judgement.

The third element is local and is the reason this museum belongs on a Caesarea itinerary rather than an art itinerary. Herod's Dream is an archaeological exhibition covering the city through the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and Crusader periods, with a section on Herod's harbour, Sebastos, following the description Josephus left. The foundation says the exhibition was produced in 1984 by the Smithsonian Institution and shown in the United States and Canada in 1988 and 1989 before settling here.

It works better as a first stop than a last one. Anyone who walks the national park afterwards has already seen the sequence of periods laid out in cases, which is exactly what the ruins then fail to label.

Ralli 2 is a different museum with a different subject, and visitors who assume it is an annexe of the first one miss most of it. It opened in April 2007 on the theme of Spanish Jewry, and its permanent collection is European painting of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries on Old Testament subjects: Adam and Eve, Noah's ark, Abraham, Isaac, Moses.

The foundation is candid about how the pictures got here. They were acquired over the years, it says, having been forgotten for a long time, and needed a long process of recovery by professionals in the field. That describes a collection assembled from the neglected end of the market and restored, and the foundation names no individual artists on its own page for the exhibition.

Four floors is more building than most visitors budget for after the Dali halls. The courtyard is the part people photograph: the fountain with its twelve lions, and the philosophers in marble standing around it.

The two collections have almost nothing in common as art, which is the point of keeping them in separate buildings. What links them is the founder's own history, running from Granada in 1492 to Salonika in 1943 and out to Montevideo and Santiago, which is also the route the Ralli collection itself travelled.

The opening pattern is what catches people out. The foundation publishes the Caesarea museums as closed on Sunday and Wednesday, open 10:30 to 17:00 on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 10:30 to 15:00 on Friday, and 10:30 to 12:30 on holiday eves. Sunday is an ordinary working day in Israel and a common day for a run up the coast, so the Sunday closure does more damage than the Wednesday one. Saturday opening, on the other hand, is unusual enough here to be worth planning around.

Entry is free and the foundation states the same for all five of its museums. Its Caesarea pages list no shop, no cafe, no guided-tour programme and no physical accessibility statement for the buildings. The address is Rothschild Boulevard, next to the water tower, and the telephone number it publishes is +972 4 626 1013.

This is not part of Caesarea National Park. The museums sit in the modern town, north-east of the ruins, under separate management and outside the park gates. A national park ticket has nothing to do with them, and their free entry has nothing to do with the park.

Budget more time than the buildings suggest from the road. Two museums and a sculpture park is more than an hour at a walk, and because there is no ticket there is nothing at the door to force a visitor to decide in advance how long to stay.