Museum

Dedicating ourselves to a wine museum, one of only two on this theme in the whole of Emilia-Romagna, for us means satisfying a great passion, preserving the memory of a vanished world and spreading its knowledge, drawing from the past information, experiences, and insights useful for understanding and living the present better. To honor the sense of the past, we named it after our father, Fernando Pizzamiglio.

In 1988, we began collecting objects, now more than four hundred, some very rare, almost all used in Emilia and dating back to a period between the early nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. In 2015, we inaugurated the current layout, the strength of our museum: interactive and informative, lively, original, and warm, curated by architect Massimo Simini, who has made museum and exhibition design his specialization and his stylistic signature is theatrical and playful touches.

Five sections introduced by a descriptive text narrate the various phases of the birth of wine, from vineyard planting to bottling and consumption; specific captions, drawings, descriptive tables, three photo frames, ancient documents, posters, and prints lead along this journey through wine as it was conceived in the second half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. All enriched by a section dedicated to children with a very playful tone scattered throughout the museum, by a musical background consisting of popular songs about wine curated by the ancient folk music group Enerbia, and by video interviews on various wine-related topics.

The museum is open for visits from Monday to Friday from 8 am to 12 pm and from 2 pm to 6 pm, Saturday and Sunday from 9:30 am to 12 pm and from 3:30 pm to 6 pm. Guided tours are available by appointment only.

Library

Wine is culture, science, and to this, and to our personal passion, we instinctively turned when we began, around 1988, to collect books, documents, prints, and maps on the subject. Today all this is contained, as in a treasure chest, in a library connected to our museum, one of the very few in Italy on this subject.

Five are the collections presented here. The main one concerns about 500 ancient Italian and French books on Viticulture and Enology and 300 on agriculture in general, dating from a period between about 1750 and 1940; among them, some 'sacred texts' stand out, such as "Etude sur le Vin" by Jacques Pasteur from 1873, "Ampelografia" by Molon from 1906, two books by Professor Guyot, and a French Viticulture manual from 1800 authored by Jean-Antoine Chaptal, the theorist of grape must sugaring (known as "Chaptalization"); furthermore, 27 years of the Giornale Vinicolo Italiano starting from 1876 and complete years of other old magazines in the sector.

Then we have numerous prints, engravings, posters, and educational charts on wine: highlights here include the tableaux from the Encyclopédie Française from 1751-1772 on the construction of barrels and the manufacture of corks, and a collection of tables on general Ampelography from the mid-19th century. A specific collection also concerns 19th-century maps of vineyards in the province of Piacenza, some of which are of excellent and particular workmanship. Finally, a collection of 200 Italian and French postcards on the subject of wine from the late 19th to the early 20th century, numerous documents on wine from Piacenza and Italy, and on agriculture in general, ranging from the 14th century to the mid-20th century. A collection of 6,000 books on art, history, nature, and literature of Piacenza is then housed in an adjacent house.

The library of the museum has already been visited and used several times by students for thesis projects and by authors of books on the history of wine to gather documentation and images.

We are open to any initiative aimed at preserving and studying the immense heritage of knowledge upon which our present rests.