Palace of mines - Fiera di Primiero

The Palace of mines, a rather severe 15th century building in late Gothic style, was the seat of the ‘mining judge’ in the reign of Sigismund, Duke of Austria and Count of the Tyrol and now hosts a small ethnographic museum set up by the Documentation Centre for the history and material culture of Primiero. It was founded in 1988 and is laid out over three floors. On the first floor, where the crafts section begins, there is a room dedicated to blacksmithing with equipment from a local forge that was active until the 1970s. On the first floor there are the tools of the carpenter, the saddler, the travelling chair-maker and sections for spinning and weaving, household items, haymaking and cultivation and finally dairying. The second floor is dedicated to mining, with an exhibition of tools, minerals, photographic documentation and material on engineer Luigi Negrelli, the famous designer of the Suez Canal, which also commemorates his numerous works with road, rail, water and architecture.