Museum of Rural Life in Fabriano

The experience

Have you ever wondered how your grandparents/great-grandparents lived in the Marche countryside last century? What tools did they use to work in the fields? What was their day like? What must they have felt?

Let’s take a step back in time together to discover agricultural traditions. Mr. and Mrs. Marcaccini have reconstructed the environments of the peasant homes of our ancestors to remind the younger generation of how life was once lived.

In Fabriano, within the region, an old farmhouse of 300 square meters now houses an original Museum of Peasant Civilization: custodian of a heritage of more than 2,500 artifacts, tools, work equipment, and furnishings that tell the story the lives of men and women who worked and lived in the countryside in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

It is interesting how the museum was born out of the generative desire of a couple who, cherishing the preservation and knowledge of certain traditions, collected the various materials from the surrounding countryside: in fact, they curated a precious collection making it possible to create a real museum, with the goal of remembering the tools that farmers (almost certainly including a relative of yours) used to work and, above all, with the intention of not forgetting their labors by retracing their daily lives.

The tour proceeds through different rooms: kitchen, dining room, bedroom, weaving room, exhibition of old crafts, wine cellar and even a barn with a collection of old carriages and farm machinery.

Perhaps some of these items may seem bizarre to us today, but they were often all that families had: it is important to know about them and stop and think about them for a moment.

At the end of the tour, we will have the pleasure of stopping by with Elide, over ninety years old co-founder of the Museum, or we will be able to hear anecdotes from the daughters who today passionately continue the work begun by their parents.

There is no doubt that the rhythm of life of any of your ancestors was similar to what the Museum wants to remember: visit with us and be surprised, learning firsthand about life in the fields, touching how many families lived and worked in certain inland areas of the Marches at the turn of the century, a time when many took the courageous decision to leave, in search of new opportunities, partly because that kind of life did not always allow for survival.

At the end of the visit, in addition to possible insights and dialogues with the family who designed the Museum, a workshop on straw hat making is also planned: traditional headgear that characterizes a very old custom (the tradition is lost in the winter evenings, when the women of Montappone, a hard-working village in the province of Fermo, a little further south, would weave the stalks of wheat harvested in the summer into long braids in front of the fireplace, which were then sewn together to form simple but effective straw hats, especially for work in the fields.

Today Montappone is one of the world’s most renowned centers for hat production; thousands are produced every year, of all materials and shapes).

Declared a UNESCO Creative City and an interesting tourist destination, thanks to the centuries-old tradition of papermaking, Fabriano itself is worth a short visit and would allow us to end the day with an excellent meal in a local osteria or for the more enthusiastic even with an educational workshop to make, and take home, your own sheet of watermarked paper, following the ancient production technique handed down by the Fabriano Master Papermakers.