What does it mean to La Tosa to have the only museum dedicated to wine in the entire Emilia-Romagna region? For us it signifies the answer to our great passion, conserving the memory of a world that is all but disappeared and spreading knowledge, reaping information, experience and intuition from the past that are useful for the present. To honor the sense of the past, we named the museum in memory of our father, Fernando Pizzamiglio.
In 1988 we began collecting objects, which today are over four hundred, almost all of which were used in our area and date back to a period of history between the early 1800s and the start of the 1900s. The objects are gathered into a large room where an itinerary is organized to follow all the phases of grape and wine production: from objects related to the cultivation of vineyards to tools used in wine making, including different kinds of wine presses, barrels, filters, pumps, capping machines and bottling machines; to the “barrel maker’s corner”, with all kinds of tools for constructing wooden barrels, and the first instruments used for analyzing wine, all featuring old catalogues of wine making tools and antique documents, stamps and announcements. The most important pieces from the museum include a “castellata”, a special kind of towed barrel used to spray treatments and distribute fertilizer in the vineyard, a large Mabille wine press on a cart from the mid 19th century, a barrel of Piacenza Vin Santo from the same period and above all a one of a kind cabinet sack filtering system.

Wine is culture, science, as well as our own very personal passion, so we instinctively began collecting books, documents and all other manner of items related to wine when we started in 1988. Today all of these items are housed in a library connected to our museum, one of the few in Italy of its kind.
There are five collections present in the library. One contains over 450 historic Italian and French books about vineyard cultivation and wine making and another 300 about general agriculture, dating back to a period ranging from 1750 and 1940 circa; among these, there are also some “sacred texts”, like the “Etude sur le vin” by Jacques Pasteur from 1873, “Ampelografia” by Molon from 1906 and two books by Professor Guyot; furthermore, 27 years of the Giornale Vinicolo Italiano starting from 1876, and complete annual collections of other old sector magazines. We also have many stamps, engravings, announcements and tablets dedicated to wine: some of the more important pieces in this collection include tableaux of the Enciclopedie Francaise dated 1751-1772 about the construction of barrels and tops, and a collection of tablets on general Ampelography from the mid 1800s. There is also a specific collection dedicated to maps from the nineteenth century of vineyards in the Piacenza province. Finally, a collection of 170 Italian and French postcards about wine from the late 1800s and early 1900s, countless documents about Italian and Piacenza wine and general agriculture spanning a time period from 1300 to the mid 20th century and a collection of 6,000 books on the art, history, nature and literature of Piacenza housed in an adjacent house.