Museo Contadino

The Museum of Rural Life "Michele Russo founded in 1995 by a former railroad retirement, Carlo Russo, with a passion for history, traditions, arts peasant.

In about thirty years Carlo Russo had traveled tirelessly campaigns Vesuvius and the hinterland of the province of Naples in search of objects and testimonies of rural referring to a previous period the introduction of agricultural machinery on fields and the organization of intensive processing of the earth.

In those years, as well as collecting items that will be the core of the collection on display starting today, meet people from which collects testimonies, stories, facts and events of life lived on the use of objects and instruments acquired, as environments social and newspapers of the past. Documents oral then collected in a valuable publication entitled “‘E sentite signuri miei “.

After a long period of homelessness, the collection finally found a place in the ancient cellai of the monumental complex of Santa Maria del Pozzo in Somma Vesuvius that, in conditions of neglect and decay, was cleaned, renovated and adapted to the arrangement of objects by the Carlo Russo himself, with the help of some young volunteers sommes.

Then came the most difficult time organizing and initiating activities, with ups and downs and instability due to the complexity of finding financial and human resources that enable a stable and organized activities. Efforts which resulted in 1998 in collaboration with a group of university students who had undertaken a course of study in the disciplines of Cultural Heritage.

From then on, the Peasant Museum grew and became an established territory with an exponential growth in visitor numbers and in external activities that Carlo Russo with the help of his colleagues managed with no little effort to implant firmly.

The untimely death of its founder in 2003, even among many difficulties, has not stopped the activities of the Museum, who found in the children of Carlo Russo the continuation of a dream and the heirs of a project still far from completed , to which they have worked and still work today continuing the father and struggle to make the museum "Michele Russo" to continue to grow and survive.