Nello Cassata Ethnostorical Museum in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto
MarinaDemidova - CC4.0
The Nello Cassata Ethnohistorical Museum in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto is considered one of the most interesting and complete anthropological museums in Italy in terms of typology, quality and quantity of exhibits.
It stands on an area of 1500 meters, which includes a manor house from the late nineteenth century. About forty-five arts and crafts workshops have been reconstructed inside the museum, where about twenty thousand period artifacts are on display, including restored and functional tools and instruments.
Among the various exhibits on display, of particular interest are some household utensils, including the first manual mechanical metal washing machine, a hip bath, some majolica spittoons, a portable bidet built into a walnut briar piece of furniture.
Interesting finds from industrial archeology are also on display, including: typewriter prototypes, a writing harpsichord with a single movable key, an Odell 1b with first generation linear index, a Blickensderfer 5 from 1880 with pad inker and rotating head, a Stansby&Wayne for the blind entirely in wood, which modulates the Braille system.
Inside the museum there is also a section that collects ancient musical instruments among which Edison's phonographs with wax discs and a prototype of portable picnic record player from the early 20th century stand out, and a section dedicated to photography and communication where it is possible to admire a wireless telegraph by Marconi, a set of posing cameras and one of the first enlargers dated 1865.
