Room 9: The stone-cutter

In the narrow bond that ties the museum "Dino Bianco" to his/her territory the preparation of the room of the stone-cutter, traditional activity of Sammichele, because of the presence of two quarries of extraction of calcareous stone (Malandacche and Chiange).

The finds showed here reconstruct actually the process of workmanship of the stone from the work in the caves to the modeling of the blocks under the experienced hands of the workers of Sammichele. Square, two prongs picks, hammer, multiple prongs picks, file, drill and obviously chisel and mallet are only a part of the tools used by these artists of the stone and displayed for the visitors.

The photographic reproductions of a characteristic decoration, the apotropaic masks, set above all on the keystone of the houses, deserves particular attention: people believed they protected her from the malignant spirits and they wished abundant crops. The masks date in the early twentieth century, and testify with elegant simplicity "the signs of the ingeniousness and the sense of the beautiful one possessed by our progenitors, because they return us forms of rare beauty that, also in the essentiality of the lines, they bring entirely the imprint of an unique spirituality" (Domenica Cici Bassi, 1997).