Museum of Documentation of Friulian Peasant Civilization in Colmello di Grotta, Farra d’Isonzo

At the end of the 18th century, the Strassoldo family, then wealthy landowners of Villanova, in the current Municipality of Farra d’Isonzo, built a place of residence and work in the hamlet of Colmello di Grotta for about ten families bound to it by sharecropping contracts. These families lived there until the early 1960s, when they slowly began to move elsewhere. The group of buildings thus rapidly deteriorated. The municipal administration soon understood the enormous value of the place and its potential. They decided to create an ethnographic museum, also thanks to the particularly favorable conditions under which the Bennati family, who had become the owners of the estate previously held by the Strassoldo family, handed over the entire building to the Municipality. The first designer and great supporter of this project was the late Prof. Marino Medeot, then municipal councilor for culture and a prominent figure in the Farra community. The restoration work began, restoring the ensemble of different buildings, which although dating from different periods, were built with the same technique, to their former splendor. The statute of the Museum of Documentation of the Peasant Civilization of Farra d’Isonzo was approved in 1981 and in 1993 the museum opened to the public with an exhibition that covers various environments and social aspects to help visitors understand what and how the peasant world was.

The museum consists of several sections: some of them recreate domestic environments such as the kitchen and bedroom, others present artisan workshops, such as the blacksmith and carpenter, trades typical of the peasant world; others investigate some aspects of the society of the time while the final sections focus on domestic activities.