The Val Varatella ethnographic museum occupies the stables of the palazzo of the counts D'Aste, in the medieval centre of Toirano: a sixteenth-century building that later passed to the Del Carretto marquises, where since 1997 the town council has gathered the working tools of an entire valley. Not works of art, but implements of field, house and workshop, the ones people lived by in Toirano and western Liguria until a few generations ago.
What to see
The display is divided into eighteen sections, and the largest part of it deals with the land: growing olives, vines and wheat, haymaking, and pressing done with animal power or with water. These are the trades that shaped the terraces of the valley, and seeing their tools lined up makes clear how much labour lies behind a cultivated slope.
The other sections widen the field: costume and clothing, hunting, the artisan trades, then popular devotion, with room given to the monasteries around Toirano and to the local confraternity of the disciplinanti. Some domestic interiors are reconstructed in full, a kitchen and a dining room, while one section is devoted to the notable figures of the village and another to the history of the palazzo, with its sixteenth-century patrician rooms set out as they must have been.
Visiting
The museum stands in the middle of the old centre, inside the grid of alleys and stone doorways of the borgo, and takes barely an hour to walk through. It is run by the town council of Toirano, so its opening times follow the council's own and it is worth checking them before setting out, especially out of season. It is a few minutes from the caves, which are what bring most visitors here in the first place, and the two stops fit comfortably into half a day.
Our editors' tip
We would keep it for after the caves rather than before: coming out of the Bears' Cemetery you are inclined to think that history in Toirano stops in the Palaeolithic, whereas here the centuries that followed, the ones of the olive and the vine, are put back in order. And ask to be shown the section on the palazzo: understanding who the D'Aste were also explains why the stables were quite so large.