Selva di Cadore: Museo Vittorino Cazzetta
July 9 in Italy ⋅ ☀️ 70 °F
The main activity of Plan C today was a visit to the Vittorino Cazzetta Museum.
Founded in 1982 as the Val Fiorentina Civic Museum, it features exhibits on paleontology, archaeology, and history. In 1997, it was dedicated to Vittorino Cazzetta, described as “… a passionate, self-taught scholar and author of the area’s most significant scientific discoveries.” Cazzetta disappeared during a trip into his beloved mountains 30 years ago.
We paid the 65+ admission — €7pp … with a discount part of the deal for another museum we hope to visit.
The museum is not very big, but it has interesting, well-planned exhibits. Information panels are in Italian and English … though the labels for items in the display cases are in Italian only (thank goodness for translation apps).
The focus of the museum is the history of the area … from the oldest geological periods to the Middle Ages. Two of the exhibits are of great importance to the region.
One is the actual skeletal remains from the mesolithic burial find of “L’Uomo di Mondeval” … the 8,000 year old Mondeval Man. The other is a cast of the first traces of dinosaur footprints discovered in Italy … found on a boulder that fell from Mount Pelmetto (one of the mountains we can see from our apartment).
We started out by watching a multimedia presentation explaining how the Dolomiti (aka the Pale Mountains) — which are inscribed on the UNESCO WHS list — were formed over 250 million years ago. Originating as vast coral reefs in a shallow tropical sea, tectonic collisions later pushed these ancient seafloor deposits thousands of feet up. The rock was then transformed by magnesium-rich waters and sculpted into jagged peaks by ice and erosion.
(That’s the short story … for more detail, you can start with this link: https://www.dolomites.org/dolomites-history/.)
We then wandered through the different sections of the museum, starting with the paleontology and geology exhibits where we saw a collection of fossils; the cast of the dinosaur tracks I mentioned earlier; displays and information about Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, including a diorama of a shelter; and of course the skeletal remains and artifacts from the Mondeval Man burial find.
The second floor had more archaeological finds, including finds from the Mandriz Shelter and the Bronze Age Mondeval de Sora. It was interesting to see how people used huge erratic boulders as part of their rustic shelters.
On this floor, we also found more ‘recent’ archaeological finds … time being relative and all that. Photo displays of the valley’s most significant historical and artistic sites — such as the ones that inspired us to visit Chiesa di Santa Fosca — rounded out our visit to the museum.
Even though this museum was not on our radar, I’m glad we had a chance to visit it and learn a bit more about the Dolomiti and the Valley of Fiorentina.
Tomorrow is moving day … we’ll be heading to the central part of the mountains.Read more