Valle di Muggio Open-Air Museum
Italy and Switzerland Blend in a Valley Between the Italian Lakes
Ask most Swiss where the Valle di Muggio is and they will look at you blankly. The southernmost frontiers of Switzerland lie surrounded by Italy, south of Lake Lugano and close to the southern tip of Lake Como. Part of the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino – which is itself Switzerland’s southernmost point -- the Valle di Muggio and the mountains that surround it form a peninsula deep into Italian territory.
This dual identity is clear in the traditions explored in an open-air museum that preserves not only buildings, but a way of life. The term open-air museum usually means a village, or at least a group of buildings in a confined space. But deep in the Valle di Muggio, between Lake Como and Lake Lugano, this museum stretches for miles and scatters throughout several towns.
Museo Etnograpfico della Valle di Muggio is no ordinary brick and mortar museum. Its base is in the village of Cabbio, high in the valley carved by the Breggia River between the steep slopes of Monte Generoso and Monte Bisbino. The concept is that a museum of the territory centers around the towns themselves, a museum of local life as it was -- and in may cases still is. Visitors should begin at the information center opposite the church in Cabbio for an overview at a large relief map showing the valley and locating sites visitors can then visit.
These mountains and the ridges that connect them form the formidable land barrier between Lake Como and Lake Lugano, but they also form a land apart in time and in its culture, one foot in Switzerland, one in Italy, part in the 21st century and part in life as it was a century ago. The museum captures this ambiguity very well, as it takes visitors back in time to the basic elements of rural life in these mountains: water, snow -- ask for the English translations of the signage.
The rest of the museum is scattered throughout the valley – buildings and activities that bring the past to life, tracing human life and work. The polenta mill, Mulino di Bruzella, is one of these, as is the chestnut drying shed and the public laundry fountain up the street in Cabbio. “The museum tries to give value back to unused objects,” the director explains. “If we continue to use these old buildings and objects, they won’t fall apart.”
While museum center is open Tuesday through Sunday from 2 to 5 pm, the best days to visit are Thursday or the first and third Sundays of each month, April through October, when the fascinating Mulino di Bruzella is operating from 2 to 4:30, and the miller demonstrates how it has worked for the past 300 years. This stone mill, powered by a water wheel, sits deep in a valley, reached by a wide path through the forest and down to the river – about a 30-minute walk from the road. The mill grinds the rare local red corn, Rosso di Ticino, a heritage crop revived through back-breeding and grown only in this region. Visitors can buy the polenta at the mill.
Throughout the valley and at local farmers markets they can also buy the products of local farms, products made in much the same way they were a century ago – honey, polenta, wine, grappa, chestnuts, butter and cheeses. Much of the local soft formagini and ricotta is made from the milk of goats that graze free in the mountain pastures for most of the year.
Museo Etnografico della Valle di Muggio, Casa Cantoni, Cabbio; tel +41 091 690 20 38.
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