Museo Casa d’Erci

Casa d’Erci is an ethnographic museum in Grezzano, a village in the Mugello countryside near Borgo San Lorenzo. It stands in a 16th-century farmhouse called Il Casino, first recorded in the 1300s, where the last sharecroppers left in 1962. The building shows typical Mugello farmhouse features: stone walls, a ridged roof and several floors for living, working and storing hay. The surrounding farm once covered six hectares of terraced fields, an oak wood and chestnut groves. The museum was founded in 1978 by the cultural group Gruppo d’Erci, which began collecting tools, household objects and photographs after a 1976 agricultural exhibition. Today it holds 28 indoor and outdoor sections with farm and forestry tools, reconstructed rooms and an archive of 525 photographs taken between 1894 and the 1950s. The Dapples-Wirz albums document daily rural life, while oral recordings and films preserve memories of the sharecropping era. Visitors walk through restored farm interiors and under roofed areas that once housed sheep and a sawmill. Outside, a 1.5-kilometre loop trail passes 130 labelled plants and reconstructions of woodland and field environments. The route links the museum to the regional Giogo-Casaglia forest, showing how farming shaped the landscape. Regular workshops, temporary exhibitions and guided walks connect visitors to the living memory of Mugello’s rural past.