The new Ethnohistorical Sorcery Museum in Triora is opening soon

Triora’s new ethnohistorical Museum of Sorcery is opening in the historic Palazzo Stella, a magnificent building restored after World War II’s serious damages.

The Museum’s inauguration scheduled for Saturday at 11am is, in fact, a double opening which brings to light both a Triora architectural gem and the major village’s culture of witchcraft for which people were horribly tortured and accused in the well-known 1587- 89 processes.

The Museum, in this first phase, offers four significant halls, which express the knowledge of a world increasingly marginalized and persecuted in the medieval West and which comes down to us through a heavy layering of stereotypes: from the witch to befana archetype.

Here the exhibitions in each room:

• First room: the 'magical thinking' with the prestigious esoteric collection 'Pio Breddo'.
• Second room: art forms, images of “Goddesses, spirits and female creatures”
• Third room: herbal fragrances guide us to explore the powers of dominae herbarum’s herbal medicine
• Fourth room: the invention of the evil witch and the Triora process. Ancient texts by demonologists attest evident premeditation in hitting the 'deviant', while the voice of Franchetta Borelli, aka Laura Sicignano, involves us in the torture used to forcefully obtain 'confessions'.

Specific attention is given to children, greeted at the entrance by Triora Primary School’s video; additionally, exclusive watercolour reprints by Libereso Guglielmi and 'The absurd witch' book’s illustrations by Diana Fontana are located in each room.

This is just the beginning of an expressive and artistic itinerary likely to continue in other evocative rooms of Palazzo Stella, which will also host a rich library and an international witchcraft and witch hunts documentation center.