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MUSEAL UNITS:

An age-old agricultural and pastoral economy has strongly marked the natural and socio-cultural environment of the area. The migratory exodus of the Sixties and the Seventies, underlined by a considerable population decrease, caused a condition of ‘fossilization’ of the signs of the economy and of the culture that had settled in the area, unlike the low-hills and coastal area, involved in the industrial development of the years after the Second World War.  

Medieval quarter courtyard

This phenomenon, common to other small neighbouring centres, was short, as it was undermined by a parallel social and cultural ferment that drove people to a frenetic refusal and cancellation of everything which was expression of the poverty and hardship of the ancient rural world.

In a few years, this inconsiderate action would have provoked in Buscemi the same effects as in other centres, if, in 1988 and later, a group of clever young volunteers of the place, co-ordinated by myself, had not intervened with an initiative aiming at stopping what was happening.

From the very beginning, the leading idea has been clearly defined: recovery of the documents of the popular world which was also a recovery of the relationship man-environment, preserving and appreciating the ‘documents’ in the setting where they were used.  

Olive-press

Instead of the drawing and isolation of the ‘documents’ from their usual context, we preferred to recover and repropose the authentical work-units building museum-units. Above all as far as the places of transformation of the goods (wine-press, olive-press, mill..) and the workshops is concerned. The “documents’ of the land labour and of the family daily life have been contextualized in storehouses and traditional house-units that clearly describe the socio-economical organization of the rural world.  

As a result of this museological choice we have created an ethno-anthropological itinerary: The sites of the peasants’ work, that involves all the village. It is the only example of “paese-museo” in Europe, highly appreciated also for its architecture and landscape.

House of the labourer - Courtyard

Not only does this museum of the rural life show the “objects”,  but it also emphazises the contexts and the culture they belong to. It is not a ‘container’ of things that imitate a kind of life which has disappeared, but it is the evidence of a cultural context of a community, and of the relationship man-nature, in the flow of time.

Past and present live together; in  the stone houses of the past and the houses of today, in the wine-press and in the olive-press sites, places for the transformation of the agricultural products, we can still feel the presence of the people who were the actors of that past time, with their tools, proof of the man-environment-work connection, these people who walked miles every day, to be at home at night.

Sant'Antonio da Padova Church (Sec. XVIII)

Association for the preservation

of the Iblean Rural Culture

Via Libertà n° 10

96010 Buscemi (SIRACUSA)

Phone: 0931-878528
Fax: 0931-878721

Cantieri Multimediali

Association for the Preservation
of the Iblean Rural Culture

Centro Studi Iblei