Murales di Cibiana

Since 1980 the old houses of Cibiana di Cadore have carried more than fifty painted facades, a slow-built open-air gallery by Italian and foreign artists. Trades, legends and village disasters are recorded on the walls of a Dolomite borgo that turned its own history into public art, house by house.

Why it matters

Most decorated Italian towns inherited their frescoes; Cibiana chose its own. In 1980 this village of a few hundred residents in the Belluno Dolomites began painting murals on the facades of its oldest buildings, and the project has never formally stopped. The Cadore tourism portal describes the result as a permanent open-air collection that is enriched with new subjects almost every year, and the village's own tourism committee counts fifty or more works by Italian and foreign painters. The murals depict the working life that carried this community through centuries of emigration, mining and craft.

What to notice

The works are spread across the three inhabited nuclei of the commune — Cibiana di Sotto, Masariè and Pianezze — linked by steep lanes, so the visit unfolds as a walk between quarters rather than a single square. Look first at the correspondence between image and building: the founders wanted only the oldest houses painted, with subjects drawn from the history of each one. That is why a grocer's shop, the blacksmiths (the "Faure") and the tinker ("al Stagnin") appear on specific walls. Local accounts record scenes such as the fire of Pianezze on 3 August 1852 and "La Visciades" by Paolo Meneghesso, on the bird-catchers who used mistletoe glue, alongside more recent additions of Dolomite fauna by the naturalist painter Roberto Bianchi. The project’s motto captures its spirit: “people come to Cibiana not to take glory, but to bring it.”

Context and history

The idea is credited to Osvaldo Da Col, a Cibiana ice-cream maker who worked summer seasons in Germany and was struck by the painted religious facades he saw on the roads between Austria and Bavaria; together with the painter Vico Calabrò, a native of San Vito al Tagliamento, he proposed bringing the same idea home as a way of reviving a village at risk of depopulation. Two deliberate decisions shaped what followed. The first was pace: instead of painting everything at once, the group committed to only two or three works a year, keeping the project alive as a recurring event. The second was theme: the murals would recover trades, stories and traditions that were disappearing from living memory, including the village's celebrated emigrant ice-cream makers. Over the decades other artists joined from across Italy and from countries as distant as Japan and Russia, so the collection grew without ever being commissioned as a single scheme.