The Gypsum Museum

It has no rooms: they are the dug-out houses of the rock-hewn village. The panels are only there to explain what you are looking at.

The story

What it is and where it is

It is housed inside the dwellings and underground spaces that have been recovered and protected. It forms part of a wider museum system covering the whole area, called the “Museum of the History and Transformation of the Landscape”, which takes in two mountain communities and more than twenty municipalities of the Sangro-Aventino area.

It is the rock-hewn village of Gessopalena itself, cut into the gypsum, that makes up an open-air museum: the materials and panels kept in the buildings are there to help make sense of it and at the same time to suggest how to read some of the unusual and singular landscapes found throughout the Aventino valley.

The subjects covered

• How gypsum forms and where it is found in Abruzzo and in the Aventino valley;
• plant life and vegetation;
• the features of underground architecture and of the houses;
• the production cycles of gypsum: kinds of quarry and kiln;
• the use of the material in its various forms — stone, brick, binders, plasters, stuccoes, walls, false ceilings — and together with other natural materials such as canes, straw and rushes.

As a visit to the museum makes clear, and above all a visit to the places themselves, one can study the bio-architecture of the past and draw ideas from it for the present and the future.

An open-air classroom for geologists

The gypsum mass of Gessopalena, with its museum, has been included in study visits planned and run regularly by the university in Abruzzo, in particular the geology faculty at Chieti, for study and teaching directly on site.

The students arrive by coach at Roccascalegna, visit the sandstone outcrops on which the medieval castle and village were built, then go on foot down into the Rio Secco gorges and climb back up along the sandstone of the Morge della Penna. The final goal is the great, magical gypsum rock, from which the eye takes in the whole valley. In the square at Gessopalena they board the coach again for Palena, passing beneath La Morgia.