Museum of Rural Life

The Gino Orlando Museum of Rural Life and Popular Traditions turns the rooms of the Ducal Palace into a collective biography of lower Salento. Created in 1990 through local initiative and volunteer work, the collection grew through private donations to more than a thousand original objects. Rather than presenting rural life as a picturesque backdrop, it records the knowledge, physical effort and small inventions that structured work and home life before mechanized agriculture transformed the area.

The agricultural section follows activities such as ploughing, cereal processing and the olive harvest, alongside the specialist tools of quarry workers, carpenters, blacksmiths, cobblers and itinerant repairers. Upstairs, reconstructed domestic settings shift attention to less visible labour: cooking, washing clothes in the traditional cofano, preparing a household linen trousseau and weaving on a large working loom. The arrangement helps visitors connect each object to a task and a season rather than seeing an isolated display of old tools.

The museum is particularly valuable after a visit to an underground oil mill. The mill explains one highly specialized industry; the collection restores the wider network of farms, workshops and households that sustained it. The palace setting adds another productive contrast, placing the material culture of workers and craftspeople inside a former noble residence.