MAF - Centro di Documentazione del Mondo Agricolo Ferrarese

The Documentation Centre of the Ferrara Agricultural World, or MAF, preserves material culture from rural life in the province during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its collections include household objects, craft workshops, farm machinery and materials related to traditional puppet theatre.

Why it matters

The centre documents the tools, trades and domestic settings of an agricultural landscape whose everyday material culture was disappearing. Its collection of about 30,000 objects records changes in work and village life, including the transition from manual labour to mechanisation.

What to notice

A reconstructed rural street brings together an osteria, grocery, school, bakery, barber, tailor and bank. A furnished peasant house evokes domestic life, while a machinery pavilion presents equipment used in agricultural work. Sections also cover itinerant trades and transport. The puppet-theatre collection includes more than one hundred original objects associated with puppeteers Ettore Forni and Pompeo Gandolfi.

Context and history

The centre developed from a collection depot into a museum with sections on village crafts, offices, rural homes and mechanised agriculture. Its holdings record Ferrara’s agricultural world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The puppet materials form a distinctive part of its ethnographic collections.