Arts and Crafts Museum of a Time in Cisterna d'Asti, Langhe

Address

Piazza Maggiore Hope, 1, 14010 Cisterna D'asti, AT, Italia — Go to map ↝

Business Hours

Saturday and Sunday 15:00 → 19:00

Contacts

Website Email Tel: +39 0141 979021

Closing Day

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Holidays

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Founded in 1980 by a group of volunteers, the Cisterna Museum is now the most important ethnographic museum in Piedmont.

Inside the 23 rooms spread over the three floors of the castle are 25 workshops, with objects and furniture from the past collected, restored and arranged by volunteers in the castle rooms.

Its openness to the area has also led to a positive re-evaluation of historical memory andlocal identity, a substantially different perspective than the one dominant in past decades, which regarded the legacy of peasant culture linked to our area as inadequate to the demands of modernity.

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Tobacconist's shop - Museum of Cisterna d'Asti

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1. The frame

The Cisterna weaver produced cloth for the villagers using hemp grown by farmers and spun by the women of the house.

2. Tobacconist's shop

Tobacco was sold loose, blended and weighed at the time

The Rooms

The rooms display traditional work tools used to carry out ancient crafts.

Most of the rooms are dedicated to an ancient trade: cooper, carradore (the one who repaired wagons), cobbler, carpenter, weaver, tailor, and many others.

Fascinating workshops with an ancient flavor have been reconstructed inside some of the rooms, where traditional work tools, all donated by residents or recovered from neighboring towns, can be admired.

While the Music Room pays homage to this art by showcasing the components of some antique organs from a family of organ builders who operated in the village of San Damiano, the Middle Class Room, on the other hand, is a space that presents objects that peasants only saw in the homes of the wealthy.

The presence of trellises for drying fruit shows the presence in wealthy families of habits similar to those of peasants, which, however, were supported by more sophisticated equipment (peasants dried fruit on tea towels exposed to the sun. The objects in the room come from Vezza d’Alba and belonged to Dr. Ercole Ferrio.

Other rooms, however, are devoted to past stores in the village such as the nougat store, bakery, print shop, and tobacco shop, where cigars but also salt, candy, and in more recent times, toys and stationery could be found.

Not to be missed: among the tools and working objects of the mattress maker and boilermaker, in the itinerant work store, the cart of the ingenious knife-grinder from Cisterna d’Asti stands out, who by turning his own means of transportation upside down made a grinding wheel out of it.

N° of rooms

23

Visit Duration

2h

Ticket Price

Starting at 7€

Audioguides

Not available

Guided Visit

Mandatory

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1. The bakery

The working tools that were once used in the village bakery

2. Music room

It was set up thanks to unique pieces donated by a family of organ builders from San Damiano d’Asti

Prices and information

Some useful information for visitors

Visits to the Museum are guided and require payment of the entrance fee:

7,00 € full
5,00 € reduced (children aged 3 to 18, over 65, groups of at least 15 people)
free (for holders of Tessera Musei Torino Città Capitale, Torino+Piemonte Card, children from 0 to 3 years old, children from 3 to 14 years old with family)

Guided tours are available for groups of at least 15 people Monday through Sunday, by appointment.

The castle

Renovated and augmented over time, the castle of Cisterna d'Asti shows obvious constructions from different eras. The first documentary mention of the place dates back to a deed of 980. In 1912, the castle was acquired by the City of Cisterna by Savoy donation.