Mostra permanente del Buttero e del cavallo

Before the Pontine Marshes were drained, the plain belonged to horsemen. The butteri — the mounted herdsmen who managed half-wild cattle between Rome and Terracina — had one of their strongholds at Cisterna, and the town keeps their memory in a permanent civic exhibition inside Palazzo Caetani: paintings and documents, saddles and harnesses, the working kit of a vanished trade.

Why it matters

The Permanent Exhibition of the Buttero and the Horse, also known as the Raccolta Civica dedicated to the horse and the buttero, is the civic museum identity of Cisterna di Latina. It is installed on the upper floor of Palazzo Caetani, alongside the picture gallery and the archaeological collection, and it gathers the material culture and documentation of the butteri, the mounted herdsmen of the Agro Pontino whose world disappeared with the twentieth-century land reclamation. The local tourist board of the Riviera d'Ulisse (IAT) describes a collection organised in three registers — artistic, documentary and patrimonial — which makes it usable both as art and as history. The collection connects the buttero tradition to the transformation of the Pontine plain.

What to notice

The three sections are The artistic section assembles twentieth-century and contemporary works — installations, graphics, collages, photographic compositions and paintings — all orbiting the equestrian theme, evidence that the buttero remains a live subject for artists rather than a nostalgia item. The documentary section carries the interpretive weight: texts, images and archive records on the transformation of the landscape, on agricultural and horse-breeding activity, and specifically on the butteri's work in Cisterna's territory, including the drives and round-ups that defined the calendar of the marsh. The patrimonial section is the tactile one: saddles, harnesses, uniforms and rural tools, period pieces alongside reproductions of everyday objects that would otherwise have vanished. Together they document the figure of the buttero, also celebrated in Cisterna’s Palio dell’Anello.

Context and history

The buttero was the horseback counterpart of the marsh economy: hired by livestock estates to herd the long-horned cattle that grazed half-wild on the Pontine plain, skilled in the lasso and in the demanding local saddlery. Cisterna di Latina stood at the centre of that economy, and the town's identity has stayed attached to the figure even after the reclamation of the 1930s transformed pasture into farmland. The civic collection grew out of that attachment: the municipality lists the permanent exhibition among its museums and monuments, hosted at Palazzo Caetani on Piazza 19 Marzo, and the regional portal Visit Lazio presents the Raccolta Civica as the repository of documents and materials on life in the Pontine Marshes. Palazzo Caetani’s history provides a setting for the older context of the Caetani estates on which the herdsmen worked.