Nello Cassata Ethnohistory Museum

Description

The museum contains about 45 arts and crafts workshops, with 20,000 finds catalogued and protected by the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage of Messina.

The exhibition includes approximately 3,000 exhibits from the collection.

The workshops reconstruct the lifecycle of handicraft using traditional methods, showing restored and working tools and instruments. The exhibition follows the ideas of the Sicilian scholar Giuseppe Pitrè, who was one of the founders of ethno-anthropological science in Italy in the 19th century.

History

At the heart of the collection is a set of bone spoon used by shepherds while away in alpeggio (mountain pastures) and collected by the founder of the museum, Nello Cassata.

The lawyer Nello Cassata was a poet who wrote in the Sicilian dialect, a historian and lover of all things Sicilian. He began his collection in the mid-20th century, passing on his passion to his son Franco, General Counsel at the Appeal Court of Messina, who helped him collect the artefacts over the years.

In 1995, the Oikos Institute was founded to manage the museum, which has subsequently opened to the public.

It promotes various cultural events, dealing with material culture and anthropology (thematic study conventions, festivals with performances by storytellers, puppet theatre, classical and theatre in local dialect). The museum also includes a library specializing in general anthropology and the history of Sicily, a newspaper library and a video library open to the public.

The museum collaborates with local cultural institutions of the territory, offering advice for the preparation of related university theses and has published several works.

It offers free educational visits and training aiding voluntary organizations.

Exhibits

The museum is not organized into sections, but, instead, presents the Arts and Crafts as a whole. It is considered one of the most interesting and comprehensive anthropological museums in Italy in terms of type, quantity and quality of its exhibits.

Alongside the museum there is a restoration workshop where educational courses are also given, a refreshment area with a bookshop and a garden with rare Sicilian plants.

Much agricultural equipment is on display, including an old sessile oak vertical press, a thousand-year old oak wine press with horizontal structure and operation, the prototype of a tractor with a combustion engine, a collection of ancient nail ploughs and ploughshares, a sowing machine and hay baler. The wainwright's workshop (making the Sicilian cart) has been rebuilt.

Several household utensils are on display, including the first hand-operated metal washing machine, a hip-bath, some tiled spittoons, a portable bidet built into a burl walnut cupboard.

In addition, there are several Edison wax disc musical phonographs, a prototype of a portable picnic record player from the early 20th century, Marconi's wireless telegraph, a set of cameras and one of the first enlargers dating back to 1865.

There are also several twelve digit mechanical calculators, the first portable wooden photocopier with a graphite powder slate board, a mechanical lathe with a special tool, the "ancina", used to work wax puppets.

A section of the museum houses naval instruments, including a bronze radio direction finder, large compasses and several pieces bronze furniture. The museum also displays wooden furniture showing Bodoni’s movable type models, coming from an early twentieth century printing house, 1886 Lumiere brother's magic lantern, a movie projector from the 1930s and a mid-nineteenth century tricycle with rope-covered wheels. …