The Fassa Ladin Museum

The new home of the Fassa Ladin Museum, Museo Ladin de Fascia, has displayed the ethnographic collections of the Ladin cultural institute since 2001, the result of over 30 years of research into the culture, civilisation and traditions of the Ladin people.

The tour starts from prehistory, then presenting the production of times gone by, the history, traditions, beliefs and popular religion, until reaching the growth of mountaineering and mass tourism to the contemporary day.

The exhibition space was designed by architects Weber and Winterle under the guidance of renowned architect Ettore Sottsass.

The museum is equipped with a Multimedia Support System that allows approximately 80 brief films to be viewed on the exhibition theme. For one of these, Milo Manara, a famous Italian comic, created a series of figures representing the main characters of Ladin legend which are accompanied by original sound documents.

The museum is also home to: a teaching room, a bookshop with over 400 print and multimedia publications and a museum shop selling gadgets, prints and objects from Ladin art.

The museum, which was mostly designed in the years 1978-79, aims to bear witness to the material and spiritual culture of the Ladin people, but also to offer a lively, growing image. From this perspective, it has spread across the area with different branches: La Sia in Penia, L Molin de Pezol and L Malghièr in Pera.

La Sia de Penìa

the Trentino region is rich in streams and waterways, the first sawmills used these as a source of energy.

The Sia di Penia, is the last Venetian hydraulic sawmill in Val di Fassa. Its presence in the valley beneath Penia, has been documented from the XVI century onwards, but the structure that we see today was built in 1922 by the carpenter ‘Jochelon’ of Predazzo.

Restoration of this sawmill, property of the Association for the Cultural Heritage of Penia, was conducted between 1985-1988 by the Ladin Cultural Institute and Giuseppe Longo of Tesero. This allowed a complete operational overhaul as well as opening to the public during the summer.

The Sia uses water from the Avisio river and works via a crank handle system that moves the frame of the saw and at the same time moves the cart forward with the log to be sawn. It is used in the warmer weather for educational purposes and for the census of Penia. Since 1988 it has been an integrated section of the Fassa Ladin Museum.

L Malghièr

In Pera, at the Val di Fassa Community Dairy, the‘L Malghièr’ section of the Fassa Ladin Museum has been open since 2013 dedicated to the art of breeding and dairy production, activity of vital importance in these valleys since prehistoric times.

Here visitors can see ancient and new tools used in the making of milk, butter and cheese, texts, photographs and the tools used in research by the Cultural Institute are on display and it is also possible to observe the modern dairy-making process through the windows overlooking the production process.

L Molin de Pezol

In Pera di Fassa, admire one of the few watermills still in existence in Trentino, built by three large hydraulic wheels that activate two mills for cereals and husking barley. The mill is shown on the cadastral map of 1858, but may well date back to the XVIII century.

Restored by the Ladin Cultural Institute in 1983, by craftsmen Giuseppe Longo of Tesero and again in 2003, it was the first local section in the museum and is still used as a demonstrative tool. In this section of the Ladin Museum, all the instruments for the working of flour and equipment maintenance are on display.