The Nello Cassata Ethnohistory Museum in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto covers 1500 square metres, including the Casa di Manno, the Cassata family's two-storey country house built in the late nineteenth century. The collection began with a set of bone spoons used by shepherds in the summer pastures, gathered from the mid-twentieth century by the lawyer Nello Cassata, a dialect poet and historian, with the help of his son Franco, a senior public prosecutor. In 1995 the Oikos European Institute of Ethnology, a non-profit body that runs the museum, was founded, and the museum opened to the public that year.
What to see
On the ground floor of the house are the old barrel-vaulted palmento for pressing grapes, the door carved with scenes of country life and the atrium paved in local stone, set in a Sicilian garden. Around forty-five craft workshops have been reconstructed on the site, with restored tools in working order, following the principles of Giuseppe Pitrè; there are twenty thousand catalogued items, about 3000 of them on display. There is also the workshop of the carradore, maker of the Sicilian cart.
The objects include old oak presses, ploughs, a prototype tractor with a combustion engine, the first hand-operated metal washing machine, rare typewriters, among them a wooden one for the blind using Braille, Edison phonographs, Marconi's wireless telegraph, one of the first photographic enlargers, from 1865, and the fittings of an early twentieth-century print shop with Bodoni type.
Visiting
Beside the museum are a restoration workshop, a library of anthropology and Sicilian history and a garden of Mediterranean plants. Opening times and tickets should be checked with the museum.
Our editors' tip
Look for the «Chanson à danser», a musical machine built in the late nineteenth century by the Frenchman Folliot and brought from Verdun, made for the café chantant: with a spring mechanism and a pinned cylinder it plays strings and bells through ten tunes.
