Museo Etnografico della Gambarina "C'era una volta"

Once upon a time — the museum's name means exactly that. Inside the Gambarina Vecchia, an 18th-century barracks in a working-class district of Alessandria, volunteers have assembled the everyday world of the surrounding plain: farm kitchens, schoolrooms, workshops, toys and wars, reconstructed room by room for anyone curious how ordinary people lived.

Why it matters

The Gambarina focuses on everyday life in the surrounding plain. Its collection began in 1967, gathered by volunteers from the countryside around the city and first kept in a village elementary school before moving to the Gambarina Vecchia barracks. Across roughly 1,600 square metres on two floors, the volunteer association "Amici del Museo Etnografico Gambarina" (founded 1988) recreates the material culture of the peasant civilisation of the plain: birth, games, school, kitchen, bedroom, trousseau and wedding, plus the workshops of the cobbler, the blacksmith and the carpenter. Its exhibits preserve objects from everyday households and workplaces.

What to notice

• The "finestre sul passato" — "windows on the past" — full-room reconstructions of domestic life: the kitchen with its hearth, the bedroom, the trousseau room laid out for a wedding.
• The artisan workshops: cobbler's bench, blacksmith's forge and carpenter's tools, with the agricultural implements of the rice and wheat plain.
• A 1930s schoolroom and an early-19th-century library, surrounded by a large collection of dolls and toys.
• The wars section, centred on objects and weapons of 1915–1918, showing how the Great War entered rural households.
• The industrial corner dedicated to historic Alessandria firms — Borsalino, Paglieri, Guala — linking the countryside to the city's factories, alongside antique musical instruments. Few ethnographic collections document industrial memory next to the rural one; here the plain's two trades, farming and making, share a floor.
• A photographic archive spanning mid-19th-century daguerreotypes to images of the 1960s, and displays running "from fossils to peasant life", including natural-history curiosities.

Context and history

From 1967, volunteers salvaged tools, furniture and memorabilia as the agricultural world of the Alessandrino modernised. An association formed in 1988 developed the collection at the Gambarina Vecchia barracks. The name "C’era una volta" — "Once upon a time" — evokes its presentation of everyday life through reconstructed rooms and household objects.