Museo Ladin Ciastel de Tor

A medieval tower in the middle of the Val Badia holds the museum of the Ladin people, the Alpine community whose language has survived a thousand years among these Dolomite valleys. Inside Ciastel de Tor, archaeology, legends, crafts and contemporary Ladin life are assembled into one of South Tyrol's most distinctive regional museums.

Why it matters

The Ladins are a small Alpine people whose territory spans five valleys — Val Badia, Val Gardena, Val di Fassa, Livinallongo and Ampezzo — each with its own variant of an ancient Romance language. The Museum Ladin at Ciastel de Tor presents the community's history and contemporary culture. It is one of South Tyrol's provincial museums. The castle itself anchors the middle Val Badia: a landmark visible for kilometres, and the natural symbol for a museum about a people bound to this landscape. The museum documents the Ladin language heard in place names across the valleys.

What to notice

The permanent exhibition, "The Ladin community in the past and present", occupies the castle's original rooms and uses dioramas, shadow plays, talking portraits, animations and models. Stone Age finds and the Bronze Age fortified settlement of Sotćiastel, dated to about 1600–1250 BC, document the region's early settlement. Other themes include geology, the legendary world of the Fanes, rural work and crafts, with eighteenth-century objects and the museum's "Black Kitchen". The exhibition also covers literature, schooling, music and art in Ladinia.

Context and history

Ciastel de Tor began around 1230 as a free-standing residential tower of three storeys, built by families in service to the bishops of Brixen, and was gradually converted into a castle. By the early nineteenth century its military role had faded so far that farming families bought it and lived in it as a residence — an unusual afterlife for a noble seat. The museum institution was established in 1997 and took over the ethnographic holdings of the former Pić Museum Ladin the following year. Ciastel de Tor became the museum's main site, and in 2011 a second branch dedicated to the cave bear of the Conturines was established in San Cassiano. San Martino in Badia is also home to the Istitut Ladin "Micurà de Rü", the public body that studies and promotes the Ladin language, so the village remains the intellectual capital of Ladinia.