Welcome

You have opened the door. You have entered a time machine.
These virtual pages are a preview, a story that you can only experience in Triora.

If you want to look for man, do not stop at the inanimate objects we have displayed, but go up and see the setting in which the tools of daily work were and are used; in the houses and fields, on the paths paved with hard work, in the natural environment in which man worked and from which materials and technologies were taken, born of this nature and developed with the sole help of hands and a few tools.
You will find yourself, perhaps without knowing it, in one of the most beautiful places in Liguria, in the Regional Park of the Western Maritime Alps, where ancient human settlements, old traditions and endemisms of all kinds still coexist.

Ethnostorical Section

Didactic Section

Inside two historic buildings you will be able to understand how people lived and still live in their homes, in the surrounding open spaces, in Nature. In other words, you will discover ethnography. A population and its way of being. A mountainous territory to discover. The Liguria that is not that of the coast and the beaches, as many imagine it to be, but that lived from cultivation, breeding, craftsmanship, trade, investment and study.

There are important characters and moments in the development of this story. In the first part of the 20th century, Father Francesco Ferraironi wrote about his homeland and collected books and testimonies, and created an exhibition of popular culture in 1960. The foundation stone of a museum collection. The religious man was visionary.

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After twenty years in Italy, the cultural movement to rediscover popular life, the world of places isolated and depopulated by modernity, was alive. In this case, the mayor Luigi Capponi, the teacher Paolo Ansaldo, the Pro Triora association, the local youth, the Department of Educational Institutions of the Municipality of Genoa were fundamental: they all contributed to the creation of what is now the original field of ethnographic collections. Even today, local products still contain the legacy of centuries of know-how.

In 1987 the National Conference promoted by the Municipality of Triora and the University of Genoa on the occasion of the fourth centenary of the witchcraft trials brought Triora to international awareness for the painful story of witch-hunting. Triora, town of witches. It is now a brand of local identity. The new space for storytelling is the Ethnographic Museum of Witchcraft, the MES, in which the Municipality of Triora, the Region of Liguria and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage all participated. Innovative, dramatic, based on the studies and reading of Paolo Portone, one of the leading experts in the field. The project is still ongoing and is based in the elegant Palazzo Stella. A place where the presumed witches were also imprisoned. Their redemption is also in this choice.

Finally, get out of the historic buildings and move around as you wish because every metre of stone wall, every door, every window, every balcony, every painting and work of art in the many religious buildings, every type of dwelling, especially those in Realdo on Brigasca land, now annexed to the Municipality of Triora, every step in an unspoilt natural world, every glance towards the mountains, every hand placed on the stone of a climb, everything is past time that still lives on.

Witchcraft

Other sections

Triora is a place where to go, to learn things that will remain within you.

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