The finds from the Verdello Peasant Museum

In the nineties, Mr. Andrea Baraldini, from Verdello in the province of Bergamo, wrote to a RAI broadcast to illustrate his project. The man said he had spent the last 20 years of his life collecting objects and artifacts of peasant civilization, with the intention of making them a museum. In his opinion, those objects were not dead things from a distant past, but living evidence of how people once lived and above all of the roots of modern times. Since 1981, Mr. Baraldini had tried to recover those tools that men have used for work in the fields since the Middle Ages, and he had not limited himself to putting them all together in one room. He had also gathered a group of elderly people who had actually used those tools. These retirees often gathered to pick up the tools of their youth and go back to doing what they had been doing for years: sharpening blades or building hooves. The desire was to be able to convey to the youngest the flavor of the life of the past, from which today's well-being derives.