The ethnographic museum of Boves stands on via Filatoio, and the address is already half the explanation: a filatoio is the building where silk was worked, and the collection is about exactly that. The museum keeps objects linked to silkworm rearing and tools of farming life.
What to see
These are the two things that went together in the houses of this part of the Cuneo country: work in the fields, with its implements, and the rearing of silkworms, which took over a room of the house for a few weeks a year and brought in extra income. The objects gathered here come from that world, and lined up they tell of a domestic economy that vanished within two generations.
Visiting
It should be said at once: the museum is currently listed as closed, and openings have to be arranged with the town council of Boves, which runs it. Anyone set on going should telephone before setting out, because this is the kind of collection you visit by appointment rather than on fixed hours.
Our editors' tip
If the museum is shut, Boves still has two other collections with the same local stamp, the chestnut museum and the museum of mushrooms and natural sciences. They are three pieces of the same argument, that is, what the town and its valleys lived on before the mountains emptied: the wood, the chestnut tree and the byre.