Premium Featured Accommodation

Ecomuseo dell'Alabastro, Castellina Marittima - Pisa in Tuscany

The alabaster Ecomuseum covers various areas within the province of Pisa in a territory essentially made up of the townships of Castelllina M.ma, Santa Luce and Volterra. Castellina and Santa Luce in particular once featured alabaster quarries along the river Marmolaio, a borderline running between the two cities. This stone can also be found in Riparbella, Montecatini, Val di Cecina and Volterra. In these two latter cities alabaster workmanship produced objects of great artistic value since Etruscan and Roman times, creating an important and skilled craftsmanship (cinerary urns and archeological scuptural findings housed in the Museo Guarnacci in Volterra).

The Ecomusuem is an institute which deals with studying, preserving, estimating and presenting the collective memory of the defined area, involved in alabaster-based activities (mining/processing/trading). This museum works in various ways: an ecomuseum, in fact, is a type of museum in which the population actively takes part in getting to know and enjoying their territory in as much as the people are the keepers of recollections and the bridge between the past and the present. An ecomuseum is characterized, and thus differs from other museums, by being the museum of time and space: of time because it doesn’t privilege particular and defined segments of history but follows a diachronistic path over a long span of time from the past to current times; of space because the ecomuseum formula is based on particular geomorphological and environmental characteristics. The ecomuseum model develops two itineraries: the itinerary specializing in excavations and the one specializing in processing and trading.

Articles