The Sweet Pepper Museum

Listening posts with the market gardeners' proverbs, videos on the stages of cultivation, touch screens with the old recipes. A museum about a vegetable.

The story

The museum is in the historic centre of Altino, at Palazzo Rossetti, from where one can take in the wide and varied landscapes of the Maiella and of the sunlit hills of the Sangro Valley, along which local people began to reclaim land for vegetable plots and orchards, creating new forms of landscape and new agricultural wealth. It is in this part of Abruzzo that, in 1748, the first certain record of this vegetable being grown appears.

The museum has very useful information panels and old objects, carefully chosen and placed in context. There are listening posts for the sayings and proverbs of the farming world and the accounts of the market gardeners; video screenings following the stages of growing and processing the pepper, or the sociable moments of the Altino Sweet Pepper Festival; touch screens for consulting recipes old, historic and present-day, ready to be tried.

Why a museum about a vegetable

It is a documentation centre that deals with the transformation of the Abruzzo landscape following the arrival, between 1700 and 1800, of new crops from the Americas, in the mountains as well as on the plain; with the way people's diets changed; with the spread of the pepper and its uses, including the preserving of meat and cured meats; and with the rediscovery of a forgotten culture that today can offer, above all to young people, a new cultural and economic identity, helping to answer some of the problems of employment.

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