Casa Museo della Civiltà Contadina (casa Puicher s'Kottlars)

A farmhouse in borgata Cretta stayed in continuous, unmodernised use until the 1980s — then became a museum almost without losing its breath. The Puicher s'Kottlars house keeps the smoke-blackened kitchen, the tiled corner stove, the hayloft and even the vegetable garden of Sappada's peasant civilisation, complete with the Plodar names for every room.

Why it matters

The Blockbau timber house provides a record of how families lived, worked and ate in a valley with long snowy winters. The complex in borgata Cretta, a simple-module dwelling with attached stable and hayloft dating to the second quarter of the nineteenth century, was inhabited without substantial alterations to its layout until the 1980s. The Comune di Sappada bought it in 1990, restored it under conservative philological principles, and made it part of Sappada's museum collection, alongside its ethnographic and Great War collections.

What to notice

The house preserves its original domestic arrangement: a long east-west corridor, a smoke-blackened kitchen and a dining room with wood panelling and a corner masonry stove. The attached stable and hayloft, timber-shingled roof, steep stair, workroom and balcony illustrate the building's agricultural use. Room names appear in Sappadino, the German-derived dialect of the Plodar community. The garden reflects traditional valley crops, including potatoes, cabbage, beans, turnips, barley, rye, oats, flax and herbs.

Context and history

The house is a document of the agro-pastoral year: animals below, hay above, people between, everything measured against a short growing season at around 1,250 metres. Its value lies in continuity of use — because the Puicher s'Kottlars family never modernised the layout, restorers after 1990 had an unaltered interior to conserve rather than reconstruct. The philological restoration respected that fabric, so the museum shows authentic surfaces: smoke, wear and all. The room names are given in Sappadino, the German-derived dialect of the Plodar community, a minority language taught in local schools.