MONTALLEGRO

AETHNOANTHROPOLOGYC MUSEUM "della Civiltà Contadina"

PIAZZA Bevaio TEL. 0922847092 VISITING HOURS: Mon to Sat: 9,00 am - 2,00 pm; Mon - Wed - Fri: 9,00 am - 5,00 pm FREE ADMISSION
ROOMS
1) Mondo contadino; 2) Ambiente casalingo; 3) Vita artigiana.

The museum, inaugurated in 1991, was realized in secondary school "G. Palumbo". The exposed objects were mostly given free by pupils' relatives and by Montallegro people. The museum has about 1400 pieces and it is articulated in three main sections: "homely rooms", "farmer world" and "artisan activities". The household room is well reconstructed and we can notice a bed with iron stands, wood planks and a matress stuffed with vegetable fibres. A swing coat is next to the bed and on the wall we can see the Holy Family, a holy-water font and some family photos. It stands out the classical wedding-chest, where people were used to keep their own linen long ago. In front of the bed-room we find the kitchen with the whole furnishings: clay saucepans, wood plate-rack and a "sbriga" on which kneading meal and a kneading-trough cut out a fine figure on the lower kitchen shelf. In the upper side we can admire "vasceddi" (containers used to drip "ricotta" and cheese), wood spoons and cork-bottles. It is not absent different ending century sewing-machines, a kitchen-dresser with containers for "rosolio", typical home-made Sicilian liqueur, knitting-needles and some sample of "macramè", kind of lace. Very interesting are also flat-irons which are arranged according to their evolution. Various are the objects about the farmer world and some of them have a didactic card explaining, in a chronological way, their evolution, as in the case of plough of which we can admire two wood samples and others made of iron. Among the tools, we can watch "frasca" used to compact the soil after ploughing and different models of sickle, a canna-timble used by farmers in order to protect their own fingers from cutting with the sickle during reaping. Whoever visit the museum can feel immersed and participating in a world which is part of our Sicilian ancestors and of our Sicilian culture and for this reason is to be considered as something to which one can refer in order to find our own historic roots. We can feel immersed and participating in this world, far from our modern world, hearing free and on request tapes which explain in Italian, French, English and German what we are going to see.