The province of Belluno always has a diverse culture and stratified: every area, every valley or country shows its own characteristic. The various differences between the flavors of the food, agricultural techniques and social organization can be seen even more between the band and the Dolomite Alpine foothills. At the same time there are many behaviors and knowledge shared in all areas of the Belluno and showing compliance with numerous other Alpine regions.
After visiting the canyon Brent del’Art, I used the remaining time available to explore this cultural heritage by visiting the ethnographic museum of the Province of Belluno, located in an old country house in the National Park of the Belluno Dolomites.
The purpose of this museum is to document, collect and preserve the traditions of the rural population of the province of Belluno during the last century.
Bought the ticket beginning to explore the halls of the museum through a path that is developed in several floors, each floor has its own theme with its investigation.
The ground floor, for example, is dedicated to the food system with a reproduction of a typical kitchen of Belluno and the different modes of preparation and consumption of food; differences that you notice between the area of the Dolomites, with Austrian influences, and the pre-Alpine area, closer to the plains, where prevails the use of polenta.
The first floor, however, illustrates the life of the people of Belluno in the course of this century. A life that depends very often from the mountains and where the population has done everything to make the most of the space mountain, made of steep slopes, and where you had to get the land to cultivate.
Beautiful room where there are riscostruzioni slides from timber and hay with documentation of the first cable cars, thanks to which they were halved the transport time.
The exhibition ranges then on the problems of population and poverty of the century. This opens a page on emigration to the late 800, when thousands of families emigrated to Brazil thanks to the project of colonization of virgin territories and where every family had at the disposal of land that had to be deforested and burned.
But there was another kind of emigration in the early decades of the last century: that of nurses from milk, young mothers who were leaving for the big cities to deliver their milk to babies of the richest families in exchange for a financial reward. The nurses had to leave their newborn baby leaving him to acquaintances or relatives, aware that their return would be really hard to hang up the emotional relationships.
This was one of the sections that I liked the most, partly because I was in complete ingratitude of this custom.
Almost all the rooms of the museum are interactive, you switch from the records of the various dialects of the valleys of Belluno, the simple call of chickens by farmers, to the various written records of the time.
The top floor is devoted to man’s relationship with domestic and wild animals, which live together with the pasture his most important point. Through various panels is explained that the use of the pastures were under the control of the rules of the community and concerned both grazing in pastures is to one day. The alp, it makes still in huts of Belluno, was also connected to the haymaking in order to raise cattle and to leave to the families of the farmers the task of dealing with the hay and fields.
It is estimated that to maintain a cow were needed about four tons of hay per month! With the advent of feed this number then declined significantly.
Thus ends my visit to the ethnographic museum of the Dolomites. You could talk a lot more about what this museum has to offer its visitors, including research laboratories and various exhibitions, but I thought it was right to highlight the essence of the historical and cultural value of this mountain of Veneto. Values that, despite all the problems relating to life in the mountains nowadays, are still alive and present.
