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 them by sharecropping contracts. These families lived there until the early 1960s when they slowly began moving elsewhere. The group of buildings thus underwent rapid deterioration. The Municipal Administration quickly understood 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 became owners of the estate that once belonged to the Strassoldo, transferred the entire building to the Municipality. The first creator and great supporter of this project was the late Prof. Marino Medeot, at the time a municipal councillor for culture and a prominent figure in the Farra community. The restoration work began by restoring to its former glory the complex of various buildings that, although dating back to different periods, were built using the same technique. The statute of the Museum of Documentation of the Farming Civilization of Farra d’Isonzo was approved in 1981 and in 1993 the museum facility opened to the public with an exhibition that covers different environments and social aspects to help visitors understand what the farming world was and how it functioned.

The museum consists of different sections: some of them recreate domestic environments such as the kitchen and the bedroom, others present craft workshops, such as that of the blacksmith and the carpenter, trades typical of the farming world, others investigate certain aspects of society at the time while the last ones refer to household activities.