Collezione Civica

Not every museum on Lake Iseo is about the lake. In a narrow alley behind Iseo's market square, the Collezione Civica assembles the everyday machinery of a century gone by: musical instruments, typewriters, cameras, electrical measuring devices and a corner devoted to the railway — a collection kept by enthusiasts, opened around exhibitions, and alive with local memory.

Why it matters

The Collezione Civica documents the material culture of ordinary work and leisure, a counterpoint to Iseo's medieval churches and castles. Its holdings span the objects through which the modern world arrived in a small lake town: the typewriters of its offices, the cameras of its summers, the measuring instruments — gathered in the dedicated Guerini collection — through which electricity was tamed and measured, and a railway section recalling the line that tied the Sebino coast to the national network. Kept under civic patronage with the help of local collectors, it is a museum rooted in the community that assembled and cares for it.

What to notice

The typewriters and cameras trace changes from cast-iron field machines to portable post-war designs. The Guerini collection of electrical measuring instruments includes dials, coils and bridging devices. Musical instruments and railway material add further dimensions to the collection, which has also included puppets, paper theatres and marionette scenery. A small purpose-built theatre seats fifty.

Context and history

The collection grew as a civic anthology of vintage objects rather than through a single founding bequest, and it is still shaped by the people who care for it: Tonino Mazza, a collector-curator, co-curated a 2019 exhibition of burattini and teatri di carta with Giacomo Bruno Poieri. It ranged from a Pellerin paper theatre printed at Épinal in 1890 to three-dimensional puppets bearing the faces of Iseo residents, an example of the collection's blend of documented history and local invention.