‘Il Sentiero della Civiltà Contadina’ [The Path of Agricultural Civilization] is an outdoor museum of the municipality of Bova, Greek dialect capital of Calabria that was designed and built by Saverio Micheletta.

It is a path that takes visitors down the lanes of the ancient village where the main work tools of the rural culture have been installed: water and hand- powered mill grindstones, olive oil presses, drinking troughs for animals, millstones for pressing grapes, presses for extracting essence of bergamot, and many other objects belonging to the ancient farming civilisation.

Museum construction lasted about a year from when the initial idea was born in July 2014 until its inauguration in August 2015. During that time the tools were recovered, restored and installed in the town. In addition to Saverio Micheletta’s determination, the Path came to light also due to the many fellow townspeople who offered the large assortment of installed objects, tools abandoned for decades in their fields.

‘Il Sentiero della Civiltà Contadina’ is a journey down the path of the personal history of a man and at the same time of the collective culture of a territory. It is the utilisation of an ancient village that over the centuries stood up to the invasions of foreign peoples, natural disasters, the upheavals of modernity and that proudly continues to represent an excellence of Calabria and of the entire country.

The municipal administration enthusiastically embraced the project and granted the author’s only request with enormous receptiveness: that the street that is home to the museum, as well as to his childhood home, be given the name of his father, Giuseppe Micheletta.

‘Il Sentiero della Civiltà Contadina’ is especially this. It is the homage a man pays to his roots.