Atri, the museum of donated things: closed for five years, now at the centre of a €350,000 project

In the photograph the ceiling of the hall is open in two places. Behind the plasterboard panels you can see the metal frame; the lighting tracks are bent. Below, in a row, the glass cases with the costumes, the wooden looms, the work benches.

This is the main hall of the Civic Ethnographic Museum of Atri, in Piazza San Pietro. About five years ago part of the false ceiling came loose and came to rest on a piece of furniture. Nothing underneath was broken. Since then the museum has been closed and visitors cannot go in.

In the book the museum published in 2008 there is a photograph of the same hall: the same cases, the same tracks, the ceiling intact.

Today's photograph was given to us by Ettore Cicconi, who conceived the museum and is the person in charge of it. We met him. The damage, he says, concerns the false ceiling and not the objects, and in the pictures the cases are intact. Above them, the ceiling is still open.

On 1 September 2026 Fondazione CDP awarded €350,000 to a project, RIABITA, based in the museum: coworking, workshops, artist residencies, visits. The Municipality sent us the project sheet, eight pages. It talks about many new things. About the collection that is already there, and what will happen to it, it says nothing.

What is inside

There are carts, ploughs, a large oak wine press and a seventeenth-century olive press. A cast-iron silk-reeling machine from the early twentieth century, brought from Biella, and the cutting machine of the Menozzi-De Rosa liquorice factory. The projector of Atri's first cinema. The kitchen, the bedrooms, the workshops of the shoemaker, the carpenter and the tailor, with a measuring rod from 1694. The robes of the confraternities, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the gold-embroidered dresses of nineteenth-century families. A Castelli jar from 1872. A violin from 1874 and the instruments of the town band.

In 2008 the book counted about three thousand pieces, 2,500 of them on display. The Municipality's website today says “over 2,000”.

And there is a display case which, in the 2008 book, carries this caption: “tools belonging to Atri miners in Belgium: pneumatic hammer, mess tin, helmet, overalls, masks”.

The hammer that must not spark

The hammer is still there, and it is not made of steel, Cicconi says: it is brass, or another copper alloy. A miner brought it back to Atri when he returned from Belgium.

The reason is the metal. Where the air can explode, tools are made of copper alloys because they do not spark when they strike. In the coal galleries the danger had a name: firedamp.

On 23 June 1946 Italy and Belgium signed a protocol: Italian workers in exchange for coal at a favourable price. From Atri, according to the museum's book, the first seven left on 11 November 1946; about a hundred followed in 1947, in five convoys; another forty or so between 1954 and 1958. In 1990 the museum recorded the testimonies of two of them, miners at Boussu-Bois. A few years before the last ones left, on 8 August 1956, 262 miners died at Marcinelle: 136 were Italian.

Among the museums that publish their collections online, in Italy and in Belgium, we have not found another one like it.

What it is worth in money we do not know. It is not a crown or a painting. It is a work tool, and its value is of another kind, more intimate: it belongs to a town that sent its men down there.

A collection made by the town

Almost none of this was bought. Elisa Amorosi, of the Superintendency, writes in the book that the Municipality's holdings are “made up of objects received as donations almost in their entirety, with the exception of some ceramics”. They came mostly from the homes and workshops of the historic centre. Even the display cases have a history: they had been retired from the Museo Capitolare, the cathedral museum.

The idea, Cicconi writes in the same book, dates from 1982. He was a cultural officer of the Region in Atri and visited an exhibition on popular traditions set up in a house in Isola del Gran Sasso. The first pieces collected ended up under the stairs of the Cultural Services Centre, in Corso Elio Adriano. The first donations from families arrived in 1984. In 1990 the Region recognised the collection as a museum, housed in the former covered market of Piazza San Pietro. In 1992 it became the Civic Ethnographic Museum, owned by the Municipality.

In 2008 the founders were still working for the museum on a “voluntary and unpaid” basis; since 2000 its management had been entrusted to the cooperative Il Filo d'Arianna.

There is an inventory and a register of donations, Cicconi says, with copies at the museum and at the Municipality. Part of the collection also has scientific records: at the end of the 1990s two researchers, on behalf of the Superintendency, catalogued about three hundred objects, collecting oral testimonies; the records were delivered in 1998.

The building has its own history. The former covered market stands where the church and monastery of San Pietro stood, demolished in the 1950s: in 1957 according to an archaeological study and a local historian, in 1958 according to the museum's book. The lower floor, the book said in 2008, is the last remnant of the convent; that year it was being renovated to house the Colleluori printing press, the olive press and the industrial archaeology section.

Five years behind a closed door

The public sources say nothing about the closure. The Municipality's page, updated in November 2024, describes the museum room by room and gives no opening hours. In September the newspapers wrote that it “reopens”.

There are the figures of ISTAT, the national statistics institute, which counts visitors to Italian museums: 550 in 2019, 200 in 2020, 40 in 2021, 20 in 2022. In 2021, no employees. These are also the years of the pandemic.

According to the Municipality's website, the main hall can be reached “only by a staircase”. In the museum, Cicconi reports, there is in fact a goods lift that can also carry people.

Outside its rooms, meanwhile, the museum has kept working. This is nothing new. The 2008 book lists the exhibitions to which it took its objects: the Seville Universal Exposition in 1992, Rome in 1996, the National Archaeological Museum of Chieti in 2005-2006, Teramo in 2006. In 1993 and 1994 primary school children staged two plays with the museum. In 1999 a picture library and a fifty-seat multimedia room opened, and workshops for schools followed.

The most recent papers we have seen date from 2025. On the museum's letterhead, they offer Atri's schools archaeology workshops, guided tours of the historic centre and talks on the faugni, the bonfires the town lights on the night of 7 to 8 December. At the bottom of one of those letters it says: “All the workshops offered are free of charge”. The councillor for culture is among the recipients. The local press also reported on the talk about the faugni at the Zoli school.

The letters are signed by Cicconi, who is not only the museum's man. In the 1980s, he says, he staged a Passion of Christ in Atri. He keeps an archive of photographs of the faugni taken thirty years ago. He prepared the documentation for Atri's participation in the fire festival of Agnone, in Molise, a collaboration still under way.

The €350,000

The call is “Ecosistemi culturali al Sud Italia” (Cultural ecosystems in Southern Italy) by Fondazione CDP; RIABITA is one of the three winning projects. On 3 September the Municipality registered our civic access request for the project documents. On 1 October the Department of Personal and Community Services replied by sending “the documentation currently held by the Authority”: the eight-page sheet. The figures that follow come from it.

That makes €187,000 with a price. For the other €163,000, almost half of the total, the sheet lists the activities but not their cost: the youth desk, 24 workshops, 48 school visits, a digital archive with 40 videos and 20 podcasts, exchanges abroad, a conference, communication, sixty discussion tables with citizens and associations.

The project lasts two years. It provides a coworking space with four desks, open Monday to Saturday, at €50 a month for residents. Sixty guided tours and a thousand visitors, with a €3 ticket. Four people in vulnerable circumstances hired for eighteen months, twenty hours a week. After the project, a renewable five-year agreement between the Municipality and third-sector organisations to run the museum.

A thousand visitors in two years, for a museum that counted twenty in 2022: the project is aiming high. A reopened museum, with people working in it and young people coming in, would be good news.

What is not in the sheet

We reread the eight pages looking for the museum that had been described to us. The word “museum” is there, many times. The objects appear as material for activities: visits with “storytelling + use of objects”, workshops on “restoration of objects”.

It does not say that the museum is closed, or why.

The false ceiling is not there. The lift is not there: there is a stairlift, “if on several floors”.

It does not say which rooms will remain for display and which will become coworking, workshop, hub. The €20,000 for fitting out buys tables, desks, easels and shelves for the three new spaces.

Among the items with a price, none concerns display, conservation, inventory or safekeeping of the objects. Where they will go during the works on the roof and the windows is not stated.

The person in charge of the museum, the donations and the schools the museum already works with are not there. The three hundred catalogue records are not there, nor is the lower floor that was being renovated in 2008.

The Superintendency is mentioned only once, among those who will select the artists in residence. Not for the works, nor for the collection.

A sheet for a funding call is a summary, and these answers may be in other documents: the works project, the agreement between the partners, the timetable. We had asked for them. The Municipality sent us the sheet.

A collection protected by law

Cicconi insists on one point, and asks that both citizens and those running the project know it: the museum and its collection are under the protection of the Superintendency, and any change to the place or the collections must be notified to that office.

The 2008 book already shows that the Superintendency knows this collection: its officials sat on the museum's scientific committee, and many pieces had been inventoried by the Superintendency of L'Aquila.

The law says the same. Under the Cultural Heritage Code, the collections of municipal museums are cultural property without the need for any declaration (article 10). Breaking up a collection requires the Ministry's authorisation; works on cultural property require the superintendent's; moving the objects must be notified in advance to the Superintendency (article 21). The collections of public museums cannot be sold (article 54).

The Fondazione CDP call takes this into account too: the Superintendency's authorisations must be obtained within six months of the grant's approval.

The questions

We put them to the Municipality of Atri and to the project partners.

On the hall

1. When, and by what act, was the museum closed? Has an engineer inspected the hall?
2. How much does it cost to repair the false ceiling? Is it included in the €70,000?
3. Does the lift work? What is the stairlift for?

On the collection

4. Which rooms will remain for display?
5. Will the objects be moved during the works? Where to, and who is responsible for them?
6. What conditions are attached to the objects donated by citizens?
7. Are the objects to be “used” and “restored” in the workshops those of the collection? Who authorises it?
8. Where are the roughly three hundred catalogue records delivered in 1998? Does the project take them into account?
9. Was the lower floor, under renovation in 2008, completed? Is it among the project's spaces?

On the rules and the people

10. Has the Superintendency been informed of the project? Which authorisations have been requested, and when?
11. Who runs the museum today, and what role will those who have kept it alive so far have in the project?

Why we are covering this

A civic museum is a public good. This one is so twice over: because it belongs to the Municipality and because citizens filled it. Whoever donated their grandfather's wine press or the hammer brought back from Belgium gave it to the town so that it would stay there, visible, together with the others.

RIABITA can be the opportunity to reopen those rooms. For that to happen, the town must be able to read what happens to the things it donated. We will publish in full the answers of the Municipality, the partners and the people mentioned.