Museum of Solandra Civilization, Malè

The ground floor of the former Pretura building (until 1918 an Austrian barracks) houses the Museum of Solandra Civilization, desired and created by the Centro Studi per la Val di Sole (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 of past centuries. The entrance hall hosts the most recent section (1993) dedicated to Abbot Giacomo Bresadola (1847-1929), a distinguished Solandra mycologist, born in Ortisé. In addition to documents, photographs, and correspondence, the original edition of his main work, the Iconographia Mycologica in 26 volumes, is preserved. The other rooms are dedicated to sources of subsistence (agriculture, milk processing, wood), weaving and spinning (there is an 18th-century loom recovered from the Val di Rabbi), old trades (carpenter, blacksmith, coppersmith, shoemaker), wood and its processing (reconstruction of a model of a “Venetian” sawmill). The reconstruction of two rooms of the Solandra house is evocative: the kitchen characterized by the large open hearth and the bedroom (stua), with wood-covered walls and ceiling, the tile stove, the one-and-a-half 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, how life was back then.