The museum offering of Sappada aims to give visibility to its historical-linguistic and environmental identity: the museums, connected to each other, indeed cover different and complementary aspects of the local reality.

Between the 1960s and 1970s, the concern of teacher Giuseppe Fontana to curb the ongoing dispersion of Sappada's cultural heritage led him to collect a certain amount of objects such as agricultural tools, household items, and everyday use items, eventually establishing an ethnographic museum, set up in 1972 in a building in the Bach district. Upon his death in 1975, the ethnographic museum was named after him, and since then until today, the collections have been enriched (in 1999 a geological and paleontological section was introduced). In 2009, the collections were expanded and transferred to the new location in Cima Sappada.

 The "Giuseppe Fontana" Ethnographic Museum offers a complete itinerary from the natural environment to the identity of the community that settled and integrated there. The visitor is introduced to the knowledge of the geology, flora, and fauna of the Sappada basin, which hosted the first inhabitants in the medieval age; a historical section delves into the origins and history of the Sappada people up to the present day. The ethnographic collections show how the environment has shaped their habits: the relative isolation of the past, the particular climatic conditions, together with the peculiar identity of the community as a German-speaking linguistic island, favored a nearly self-sufficient lifestyle with the development of the so-called 'wood culture'. Eloquent witnesses of this are the architectural types of the valley, period images, the display of work and festive clothing, and everyday objects from domestic environments, which tell of the simple and harsh existence led by the Sappada people. The main hall houses the tools of agro-forestry-pastoral and craft activities: from the lumberjack to the section dedicated to snow, from the shepherd to the stable, the barn, and agricultural work, from transport to the craft activities of the wheelwright, blacksmith, carpenter, and finally to the shoemaker, tailor, and weaver. At the center of the museum, as it was at the center of Sappada life, is the illustrative section of popular religiosity in the most significant moments of the liturgical year. The journey concludes with the Carnival masks (vosenòcht), among which stands out the austere figure of the Rollate.

Borgata Cima Sappada

32047 Sappada

Phone 0435 469131