Ecomuseo del Sasso di Moltrasio

Moltrasio's ecomuseum links several sites across the village: a Romanesque stone church, an alpine herder's house left as she left it, and the water heritage of the mill valley. It is the way to understand the grey sasso moltrasino that built the town and much else beside.

Why it matters

Moltrasio owes its shape and its economy to one material: the local stone quarried from the mountainside, made famous in part by the Maestri Comacini, who used it in buildings across the province of Como. The Ecomuseo del Sasso di Moltrasio — styled "primo bacino del lago di Como", the first basin of the lake — was created to keep that heritage legible, with backing from the municipality, the Pro Moltrasio association and the Cooperativa Moltrasina, as the Legacoop Lombardia record of the founding notes. Instead of exhibiting objects behind glass, it opens real places: the eleventh-century church of Sant'Agata at Vignola, the alpine home of Ernesta Donegana in the Tosnacco hamlet, and the water sites of the Pizzallo stream, where the Pro Moltrasio history page counts eleven mills working by 1722 in a valley known as the valle dei Molini.

What to notice

The ecomuseum's most affecting site is the Casa della Zia Ernesta, in Tosnacco at the foot of the mule tracks that climb to the pastures. Ernesta Donegana (1914–2012), a Moltrasio alpigiana, lived her whole life in this late-nineteenth-century house in the peasant manner, and the rooms preserve that life intact: a small stable for animals coming down from the mountain, floors paved with broad slabs of Moltrasino stone, coarse woollen clothing, kitchen utensils and the bedroom with its traditional cloth-covered mattress. The rooms preserve material evidence of alpine peasant life in the last century. Equally telling is the water system: the mills along the Pizzallo document how a mountain stream powered a rural economy, The Romanesque church of Sant'Agata also demonstrates the use of local stone.

Context and history

The ecomuseum is a recent institution with old material. Its founding was presented publicly in June 2024, in an event at the village's Sala Civica alongside the exhibition "Il sasso che parla", drawing together the village's associations — Pro Moltrasio and the Cooperativa Moltrasina among them — under the "first basin of the lake" label. The ecomuseum also curates exhibitions and cultural events in municipal spaces such as the Sala Civica. Its "ecomuseal guides" frame each site within the larger story of the sasso moltrasino — the quarries, the mule tracks, the water and the alpeggi above the village.