Museum of Solandra Civilization, Malè

The ground floor of the former Magistrate’s building (until 1918 an Austrian barracks) houses the Museum of Solandra Civilization, wanted and created by the Val di Sole Study Center (a cultural association founded in 1967). Opened in 1979 and expanded in 1983, the Museum presents itself as a permanent exhibition of objects, material testimonies of the peasant civilization of the Sole, Peio, and Rabbi valleys from past centuries. The entrance hall hosts the most recent section (1993) dedicated to Abbot Giacomo Bresadola (1847-1929), a renowned Solandra mycologist, born in Ortisé. In addition to documents, photographs, and correspondence, the original edition of his main work, Iconographia Mycologica in 26 volumes, is preserved. The other rooms are dedicated to sources of livelihood (agriculture, dairy processing, timber), weaving and spinning (there is an 18th-century loom recovered in Val di Rabbi), old trades (carpenter, blacksmith, tinker, shoemaker), wood and its working (reconstruction of a model of a “Venetian” sawmill). Particularly evocative is the reconstruction of two rooms of the Solandra house: the kitchen characterized by the large open hearth and the bedroom (stua), with wooden wall and ceiling paneling, tile stove, a one-and-a-half-sized bed, and other furniture. Hundreds of small and large objects, collected with passion and arranged by careful hands, to tell the Solandri and those who visit the valley, in winter or summer, what life was like back then.