Ecomuseo delle Terre d’Acqua

Curiosity and fascination: with these two terms one can easily sum up an experience in contact with the rice field. A very ancient reality, whose roots date back to the Bronze Age but which has evolved to such an extent that it still remains a strong point of the area today. And there must be a reason why Sebastiano Vassalli chose to write about the Vercelli rice-growing plain and why De Santis decided to dedicate a film such as Riso Amaro to it... The Vercelli plain preserves a cultural, environmental and human heritage of great value, worthy of being known nationally and internationally for the uniqueness of its characteristics. Recovering tradition; handing down a culture, civilisation and memory that are distant but still strongly rooted; enhancing the tourist, environmental and historical-cultural traits of an area that is indeed anthropised but has been able to preserve peculiar natural characteristics; interpreting the Vercelli plain, looking at it with different eyes and learning to pay attention to what it can tell us through the testimonies that have survived so many centuries of history. The Terre d'Acqua Eco-museum was set up with the aim of achieving these objectives. It is the largest and most complex of Piedmont's Eco-museums, and aims to promote and enhance the rice-field environment, revealing aspects relating to the evolution of the landscape over the centuries and the inevitable repercussions on society, the economy and the very lives of the men who lived in full contact with this reality, in a historical period when the land still represented one of the most precious assets for man. What the Eco-museum proposes is therefore to unveil aspects not perceptible at first glance, to strengthen the bond, indissoluble despite everything, of man with the surrounding territory, to promote continuity with the past, to make the territory known in all its complexity and in all its facets.