Museo della Pesca e della Civiltà Lagunare

The Museo della Pesca e della Civiltà Lagunare on Via Orseolo presents the tools and household objects of families who lived in thatched casoni in the Grado lagoon.

Why it matters

The municipal tourism portal defines the museum as the custodian of the "civiltà casonera", the community that lived for centuries in the casoni — the traditional reed-and-thatch houses of the Grado lagoon — and whose customs, preserved by the isolation of the lagoon and passed down orally, remained essentially unchanged until after the Second World War. Unlike the town's archaeological museums, it documents a way of life whose last practitioners were recorded on film. The regional tourism board describes its subject as daily life and traditional fishing in a territory shaped by isolation and proximity to nature.

What to notice

The collection includes fishing implements such as traps, nets and tools named in the Grado dialect, household objects, and material documenting the construction of casoni from lagoon timber and reeds. Its themes include fishing seasons, family life on the water and the relationship between the island town and its scattered lagoon homes. Video interviews record the recollections of former casoneri.

Context and history

The casoni were seasonal and then permanent dwellings scattered over the lagoon's islands and mudflats, home to families who combined fishing with small-scale salt-working and fowling; their material culture was frugal by necessity, everything portable or replaceable from the lagoon itself. After the Second World War the combination of motorised boats, school attendance, and the growth of tourism drew the remaining families ashore, and within a generation the casoni emptied — some were kept as fishing outposts, others collapsed. Collecting their objects and recording their voices became urgent precisely because the community had dissolved: the museum's holdings arrived largely as donations from descendants, which is why the display reads as a community act of memory rather than an academic survey. It belongs to Grado's museums documenting the town's relationship with the sea.