Here you can find a list of museums in the Gesso Valley, Vermenagna and Pesio. You will find ethnographic, natural history museums, and local handicrafts museums such as the museum of sacred art and the eco-museum of Rye or even the museum of Pinocchio in Vernante.
GESSO VALLEY
ENTRACQUE - Museo di Arte Sacra
Piazza Giovanni XXIII
Telefono: 0171.978616
Fax: 0171.978202
This Sacred Art museum is located inside a long hall linked to the parish church. It houses numerous XVII and XVIII century paintings depicting traditional religious images, including a painting of the Caravaggio school portraying the apostles. Here we can also find: saint statues, the Rosary and St. Antonino processional thrones, important reliquaries, large lanterns and processional staffs. Inside several showcases are displayed old missals, books, manuscripts, monstrance and chalices, candelabra, crucifixes, angel candleholders and vessels for Holy oils. In a separate room, we can see old holy vestments: chasubles, albs and copes.
ENTRACQUE - CENTRO FAUNISTICO UOMINI E LUPI
Piazza Giustizia e Libertà, 3
Tel. +39.0171.978616
Strada Provinciale per San Giacomo, 3 – 12010 Entracque
www.uominielupi.it
Men and Wolfs is the first faunistic centre entirely dedicated to the wolf in the Italian Alps.
How this predator arrived in the alps; the formation and life of a pack; the techniques of hunting, the fascinating history of Ligabue, the young male wolf followed in his displacements from the Apennines around Parma till the Sea Alps. These are some of the themes developed in the centre in Casermette di Entracque, that includes also a big fenced area of eight hectares where a few exemplar of wolves live.
It belongs to the complex a second show centre in Entracque, easily reachable by a shuttle bus (cost included in the ticket); it can also be reached on foot or by bike. This centre is dedicated to the relationship between man-wolf: from the myth of the Ancient Rome to Lupo Alberto of the cartoons
VALDIERI - Ecomuseo della Segale
Frazione S. Anna
Tel. 0171.97397 - Fax: 0171.97542 (Parco Naturale delle Alpi Marittime)
This eco-museum was created to show the hard living conditions of the mountain rural population, both from an environmental and from a production point of view. The first part of this eco-museum has been created by improving the path that links the town of Sant’Anna di Valdieri with the village Tetti Bartola, which is now a self-guided route. The excursion loop was extended when some houses of the villages Tetti Bartola and Tetti Bariau, and their rye-roofs, were restored with the aim of creating a portrayal of everyday life. The core of the eco-museum is located in the town of Sant’Anna, where various initiatives will be carried out with the purpose to rediscover the local cultural heritage, and its connection with rye.
VALDIERI - Museo Parrocchiale di Arte Sacra - Andonno
Via Soprana 4
Tel. 0171.97183 - Fax: 0171.97183
This museum was created inside a room adjacent to the sacristy of a Church dedicated to St Eusebius. Here furniture, vestments and ornaments belonging to the parish church are on display. Visitors can admire numerous objects, which include procession lanterns, candelabras, an embroidered cope, a monstrance, an embroidered veil, the coat of arms of Counts Ricci, sacred images and the alms box of St Anthony.
VERMENAGNA VALLEY
ROCCAVIONE - Museo Etnografico Vecchio Molino
Via Molino, 11
Telefono: 0171.767108 - Fax: 0171.757857
www.comunediroccavione.it - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
This museum is divided into three sections: the first is devoted to mills, and houses three grinders and the machinery needed for the production of flour; the second is devoted to ethnography and houses a reconstruction of a cobbler’s workshop and a display relating to trades of the past; the third is devoted to natural sciences.
VERNANTE - Museo Etnografico e Museo di Pinocchio
Via Umberto I, n 119
Tel: +39.0171.920550 - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Attilio Mussino, who is renowned for his illustrations of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, spent the last part of his life in Vernante, a small town of the Valle Vermenagna, that has paid tribute to him with this museum. Here we find some of his works, which were donated to the town of Vernante by his second wife. This collection comprises the first illustrated edition of Pinocchio of 1911, Pinocchio with animated pages published in 1942 and the thirty-three illustrated plates of the last edition by Mussapi, published on the Giornalino in1952.
PESIO VALLEY
BOVES - Museo del Fungo e di Scienze Naturali
Piazza Borelli, 6
Telefono: 0171-391834 – 0171.391811
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This museum has two large halls that accommodate numerous collections. The first has over 1100 specimens representing 250 varieties of mushrooms reproduced in plaster or resin; in the second hall you will find fossils, minerals, stuffed animals, reptiles, shells, crustaceans and a precious collection of over 130 species of butterflies from the plains and valleys of the Cuneo province. A section dedicated to ceramics and the working of exotic fibres and silk is also noteworthy. One curious corner is filled with inventions, amongst which the thermometer, the telephone and a vertical steam engine.
BOVES - Museo della Castagna
Frazione Roncaia 4,
Telefono: +39.335.6777905
www.accompagnatorinaturalistici.it – This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Opened in the autumn of 2000, this museum occupies one side of the Martinengo Marquet farmhouse. The museum was conceived as a project with transnational cooperation to promote knowledge about chestnuts. Plans are being made to turn the museum into a centre for the study of chestnuts.
CHIUSA DI PESIO - Collezione fotografica Michele Pellegrino
Via Sant'Anna, 34 - Tel:+39.0171.734021 (Parco del Marguareis)
300 photographs in black and white to help spectators discover the wonders of a natural environment as well as to make them more aware of the recuperation and promotion of local heritage.
The collection is being hosted at the headquarters of the Parco Naturale del Marguareis (National Park). The tour is split into eight sections with 300 black and white photographs shot by artist Michele Pellegrino: panoramic views of the Upper Langa valley, representations of the mountain landscape, the valley springs and typical local dwellings, faces of monks and nuns at the Carthusian monastery in Chiusa di Pesio and shots portraying significant moments in the life of men and women. The exhibit’s intention is to help spectators discover the wonders of a natural environment as well as to make them more aware of the recuperation and promotion of local heritage.
CHIUSA DI PESIO - Museo Missionario della Certosaa
C/o la Certosa Chiusa di Pesio
Tel: +39.0171.738123
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - www.vallepesio.it
Situated in the rooms adjacent to the Charterhouse, this late Renaissance architectural complex conserves the testimonies of its grand past as a religious and cultural centre. It houses numerous objects gathered by the missionaries of the Consulate in the Amazon and Africa (objects from indigenous tribes) and stuffed animals belonging to the natural heritage of those faraway countries.
CHIUSA DI PESIO - Museo della Regia Fabbrica dei vetri e dei cristalli
Piazza Cavour, 15
Tel: +39.0171.734990 - Fax: +39.0171.735339
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - www.chiusaantica.it
In the centre of this town, on the first floor of a fifteenth century palace, is a Museum. Inside the museum are kept precious objects, evidence of the activity of the “Regia Fabbrica dei vetri e dei cristalli e della ceramica della Chiusa” (Royal Glass, Crystal and Ceramics Factory of Chiusa). It was an important factory operating between the mid-seventeen hundreds and the mid-eighteen hundreds. The factory was, for the community of Chiusa, an element of unification and wealth that for many years gave employment to the people of the Valle di Pesio (Pesio Valley). Today the Museum shows what used to be the factory’s output: mirrors, windowpanes, phials, vases, glass and crystal compotes, oil-lamps and candelabras. Part of the exhibition is devoted to another typical Chiusa product of the eighteen hundreds: fireproof ceramics and hand-painted ceramics. Some examples of the refined dinner services that used to leave Chiusa to be sold in the rest of Italy or in France are, in fact, displayed here.
ROCCA DE' BALDI - Museo Storico Etnografico provinciale Augusto Doro
Piazza Pio VII
Tel: +39 0174 587605
www.castelliaperti.it – This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The castle of Rocca De' Baldi is host to the museo Storico-Etnografico "Augusto Doro", which is rich with ethnographic material dedicated to the farming culture and arranged in three thematic exhibitions: the seed, the plough and the harvest; the pasture, milk and cheese, men, woods and chestnuts. The castle, precious premises of the museum, makes the collection’s set up precious as it keeps furnishings, precious frescoes and tapestries.
