Museo Etnografico del Ponente Ligure 'Franco Ferrero'

Inside the thirteenth-century walls of Cervo's Clavesana Castle, the Museo Etnografico del Ponente Ligure "Franco Ferrero" rebuilds the working life of western Liguria room by room: the kitchen, the workshop, the field and the boat, peopled by life-size figures in original dress. More than two thousand objects keep everyday history on the record.

Why it matters

Folk museums usually show you things; this one stages a world. The municipality describes it as the most precious and complete collection of its kind in the whole of western Liguria — a strong claim from the body that runs it, but grounded in a concrete method: full-scale scenes of nineteenth-century domestic life, crafts, agriculture and seafaring, animated by papier-mâché mannequins dressed in period costume. The roughly two thousand tools, utensils and household objects were made and used by the people of Cervo and its valleys between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and they document a coastal economy that lived from poor soil, olive terraces and the coral fished off Sardinia and Corsica. When that way of work ended, this collection kept its evidence.

What to notice

Life-size mannequins in the castle's vaulted rooms stage domestic life and crafts with tools shown in use. The collection includes models of local ships, coral-harvesting equipment, eighteenth-century corsets, folk costumes and seventeenth-century lamps known as frasche. The permanent exhibition "Donne di Liguria – Un secolo di storia 1850–1950", installed by the Associazione Culturale ARCADIA of Diano Marina, presents Ligurian women's work, dress and social change through more than 250 dolls in period clothing, with hand-worked garments and lace.

Context and history

The museum is the main component of the Polo Museale "Castello Clavesana", the municipal museum hub inside the castle built by the Clavesana marquesses above the borgo. It takes its name from Franco Ferrero. The collection preserves the material culture of a community that made use of scarce local resources and reused tools and household goods. The "Donne di Liguria" section, registered as a permanent part of the hub, extends that record from objects to social history, following Ligurian women across the century that ran from mid-1800s tradition to mid-1900s modernity.