There are gestures, moments, and rituals with a highly symbolic charge, deeply imprinted in each person's experience, which indelibly document the roots of one's identity, yet which often succumb to the indifferent pressure of ongoing transformations and the flow of events. The twentieth century was undoubtedly the century of the most significant and rapid transformations, which forced our closest predecessors to experience drastic and irreversible changes.

Spurred by facile enthusiasm, driven by the possibility of improving their socioeconomic conditions, the inhabitants of "rural Italy," closely tied to an increasingly avaricious land that prevents them from comfortably living off their own resources, drown in their imaginations of future prosperity and, in turn, erase from their memories past poverty, attempting to sever their village roots. When the past recedes and becomes history, it resurfaces gloriously, stripped of contingent vicissitudes, and regains its essential role as a bulwark of the present and a springboard toward the future.

This is the moment in which the desire to rediscover and reevaluate the past is born, with which we, "children of this time," intend to recover a connecting relationship by discovering ourselves as its ultimate spokespersons.

By creating a small "Museum" in Posticciola, we aim to offer an exhibition journey through the history of the people of the Turano Valley and express, through the tools of their trade, the encounter between man, nature, and culture.

We wish to reclaim human activity as a specific key to understanding the historical and social knowledge of our ancestors: through their ways of working, organizing, planning, and believing, it is possible to enter the "vanished everyday," to understand humanity and its world, its labors and ingenuity, discovering its deepest and noblest soul. From the fields rises the purest and most genuine voice: it is the plow that evokes the yoked oxen (ù 'juu) engaged, in a sort of symbiosis between man and animal, in the preparatory act of fertilizing the earth according to the eternal cycle of reproduction of life.

It's the curved sickle that closes the harvest cycle, evoking sunny moments of unity, where gathering the crops around the sheaves reflects a magical gesture of communion. Or the overflowing vats, containing the fruits of the harvest, which seem to symbolize the end of the farming season and the beginning of a period of stagnation for peasant families who, like grapes awaiting their slow transformation in the vats, convert their activities, recycling themselves into the most varied professions of blacksmith, carpenter, cobbler, woodcutter, and so on. It's the cold season, and tools like the "cormaro" and the "jemmero" recall the ritual act of killing the pig: a bloody rite that sparks celebration even on the gray days of the winter solstice.

By evoking these moments, our "museum" aims to tell the story of women and men who, in the space of a few generations, lost extraordinary traditions and culture. These are moments of simple, hard-working lives that take on a historical dimension and express deep-seated knowledge that has now eluded the new computer-savvy generations; they are the sign of a world that often timidly survives in personal and family memories, a world that risks disappearing forever and that forcefully demands the right and duty to reclaim its central role in our land's historical journey toward a conscious future.

(Maria Teresa CODERONI)