Museo di documentazione della civiltà contadina friulana di 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 village of Colmello di Grotta for about ten families tied to it by colonate contracts. These families lived there until the early 1960s when they slowly began to move elsewhere. The group of buildings thus underwent rapid deterioration. The municipal administration soon realized the enormous value of that place and its potential. It decided to create an ethnographic museum, also thanks to the particularly favorable conditions under which the Bennati family, who had become the owner of the estate that once belonged to the Strassoldo family, transferred the entire building to the Municipality. The first creator and great supporter of this project was the late Prof. Marino Medeot, then municipal councilor for culture and a prominent figure in the Farra scene. The renovation work began to restore the complex of the various buildings, which, although dating from different periods, were built using the same technique, to their former glory. The Charter of the Museum of Documentation of Peasant Civilization of Farra d’Isonzo was approved in 1981 and in 1993 the museum opened to the public with an exhibition encompassing various environments and social aspects to help visitors understand how and what the peasant world was.

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