Museo della civiltà contadina. Todi (PG)

Museo

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The Museo della Civiltà Contadina is located in Bodoglie Alte, a few kilometers from the historical center of Todi. [...] Open to visitors since 1987, the Museum of Bodoglie was instituted thanks to the initiative of Tersilio Foglietti, a former sharecropper and then entrepreneur in the furniture sector, who invested his experience as a farmer in a passionate three-year search for tools, utensils and machinery suited to represent the most typical rural civilization of the Umbria region. The Museum occupies the space of a construction that was once a barn. The collections are arranged following a thematic subdivision reflecting the disposition of rooms of a typical rural house of peasants. The display starts with the representation of the kitchen, which hosts the “Insaccatrice”—i.e. the staffing machine used to make sausages—the washbasin, the “madia”— i.e. the wooden cupboard used for kneading bread dough—and the “battilarda”— i.e. a wooden chopping board especially used to cut bacon to give more flavor to the food or to cut fat for making soap. In the bedroom there is a bed, with its mattress full of cornhusks, the bed warmer called “prete”, and the baby walker called “girello”. Next to the latter, the room dedicated to the weaving and spinning activities hosts a precious wooden handloom that is perfectly preserved. The largest room displays the utensils for working in the fields and the tools for the artisanal activities: the plough called ”voltaorecchio”—defined as such by popular imagination because it was able to cut furrows in the soil and turn them over, to the right or to the left as needed, with respect to the marching direction—the sifting tools and the mill stones to grind grains, not counting the tools of the “ciabattino”—i.e. the shoemaker—and that of the carpenter. There are also exhibited a number of measures for agriculture like the sack, or the “staio”—a wood container to measure grains, olives and cereals—the cup, the tankard and the “foglietta” to measure processed products such as oil and flour. In front of the building there are a number of farming tractors, among them a 1917 Ford and a 1918 Fiat testify the shift from a largely manual farming to a mechanized one.