Museum of Rural Civilization of Fabriano: life and traditions of our farmers of the past

The experience

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

Let’s take a leap into the past together to discover agricultural traditions. The Marcaccini couple have reconstructed the rooms of the peasant houses of our ancestors to remind the younger generations of how people once lived.

In Fabriano, within the region, an ancient 300m2 farmhouse now houses an original Museum of Rural Civilization: custodian of a heritage of over 2500 artefacts, tools, work equipment and furnishings which tell the story of life of men and women who worked and lived in the countryside between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

It is interesting how the museum was born from the generative desire of a couple who, having at heart the protection and knowledge of certain traditions, collected various materials from the surrounding countryside: they have in fact curated a precious collection making it possible to create a true and its own museum, with the aim of remembering the tools that the farmers (almost certainly also one of your relatives) used to work and, above all, with the aim of not forgetting their efforts, retracing their daily lives.

The route proceeds through different environments: kitchen, dining room, bedroom, weaving room, exhibition of ancient crafts, cellar and even a barn with a collection of ancient carriages and agricultural machinery.

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

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

There is no doubt that the pace of life of some of your ancestors was similar to what the Museum wants to remember: come and visit with us and let yourself be surprised, getting to know life in the fields first-hand, seeing first-hand how many people lived and worked. families in certain internal areas of the Marche, between the two centuries, a time in which many made the courageous decision to leave, in search of new opportunities, also because that type of life did not always allow them to survive.

At the end of the visit, in addition to possible insights and dialogues with the family who created the Museum, there will also be a workshop on the production of the straw hat: a traditional headdress that characterizes an ancient custom (the tradition is lost on winter evenings , when the women of Montappone, a hard-working village in the province of Fermo, a little further south, in front of the fireplace braided the stalks of wheat harvested in the summer into long braids which were then sewn to form simple but effective straw hats, especially for the work in the fields.

Today Montappone is one of the most renowned centers in the world for the production of hats, thousands of them are produced every year, of all materials and shapes).

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