Nativity Section
The Gandino Nativity Museum, opened at Christmas 1988, occupies six rooms located on the first and second floors of the 17th-century building of the old elementary schools.
On display are some 600 nativity scenes, representing more than 60 countries, as well as paintings with the subject of the Nativity and various sacred furnishings.
The collection is named after St. John Paul II, whose precious zucchetto or solideo is also kept in the museum, and who donated a Brazilian nativity scene.
There are works by well-known Spanish, French and Italian artists and unknown African and Latin American sculptors.
The materials are the most varied: from traditional wood, blown glass, ceramics, ivory, bamboo, dried tropical fruit peels to corn leaves.
Textile section
Opened in the 1990s, it is located in the same building where the Nativity Section is also located. It is a collection of objects and equipment that made the history of the economy of the Gandino Valley, which based its fortunes precisely on the textile industry. It occupies several rooms on the ground floor and part of the outside porch in which the bulkiest equipment is arranged, including: – a vegetable thistle gauzing machine (used to produce the so-called ‘pannilana’ for which the Gandino Valley is famous) – a follo (a machine used to firm and compact woolen cloths) – a (partial) drying rack known as a ‘ciodera’.
In the halls, on the other hand, smaller objects also used in the various stages of fabric processing are exhibited and preserved: – a hand press- some scales – a jacquard loom (operated with perforated cards that predetermined the design of the fabric) together with a tool for perforating and preparing the cards – a doubling machine (for folding the fabric) – a hemming machine – archers – samples of the fabrics produced.
There are also small-scale reconstructions, of a dyehouse and /no drying room, large infrastructures that have disappeared today.