The village museum of Aldein

Do not expect a usual museum, here you certainly won´t find farm or craft equipment.

You will have the occasion to admire numerous sacral baroque and rococo exposures. The splendour of the liturgical pieces, robes, reliquaries and plates are testimony of worship of saints, pilgrimage and piety through centuries.

Because of its form beauty and material, a baroque goblet (a work made in Augsburg in 1750) has to be mentioned. From Bozen come numerous silver belts and different flags and from the school of Flaimstal, the portraits of famous personalities of Aldein such as Cardinal Johann Baptist Franzelin, the only cardinal South-Tyrol ever had and Sir Andreas Alois Dipoli von Treuheim, president of the supreme court of Tyrol and Vorarlberg: R.C. dean Josef Kalser, the last dean in Bozen and Doctor Tony Ebner, chief editor of the newspaper “Dolomiten” and member of parliament in Rom as well as in the European parliament for many years. Two pictures show us the founders of the Thalbenefiziums, Johann Josef and Johann georg von Baroni zu Ehrenfeld. We just mentioned a few of the artefacts you can admire here.

History of the museum

On 29^th August 1989, the curator of the land Dr. Karl Wolfsgruber visited in name of the R.C. curia the museum, he gave his experts opinion on the artefacts from the church, the chapel and the old parsonage and especially the things coming from the Maria Snow chapel. Visible impressed about the high standard an quality of the art pieces, he said: “Absolute worth being exposed in a museum.”

To safeguard these treasures, the R.C. curia let the treasures to the museum on the condition they must been shown to the public. Mr. Alfons and Josef Matzneller prepared the pieces to be exposed and our local bank, the Raiffeisenkasse Deutschnofen-Aldein, gave an exposing room for free. It took a lot of time to clean and shine up the pieces.

Finally, on 26th Mai, the museum could be opened. In 1998 the museum moved in bigger rooms on the first floor of our school. At the beginning of June 2000 the museum extended with one more room, in which you can admire the gifts of Dr.Widmoser and Dr. Gruber, the founder of the museum. It concerns a private collection of pictures, coins, medals and other sacral pieces. So you can find in Aldein, our small mountain village, surprising small sacral jewels.

Reinhart Pichler