SMI Museum and Refuges

Art and culture Museums
Viale Luigi Orlando, Toscana Italia | (Allarga la mappa)

Finding words to explain what SMI meant to the Pistoia mountains is almost impossible, the bond that united them was too strong and too great to even imagine it and the regret of having lost it is still too alive and painful. SMI still lives in the many small stories of those who worked there and lived it creating a great puzzle that, if nothing else, comes very close to describe those times that seemed destined to never end. SMI closed the last factory in the early 2000s between protests and dismay, and since then the mountain has not been the same. To tell this story, almost 100 years long, the SMI Museum Refuges was inaugurated in 2012.

The museum is the result of a long work of recovery of objects, materials and documents that tell the history of the factory, of its production and of the daily life of hundreds of families through 6 thematic rooms that deepen the various aspects of the life of the establishment and of the society. You will be accompanied on this journey by prepared and helpful guides who will show you each of the rooms of the museum. The rooms that you can visit are:

  • the room of the scale model of Campo di Tizzorro and of the charitable works.
  • The room of Italian munitions and Fritz Werner ammunition loaders.
  • The munitions control room
  • The Presidency room, with a collection of memorabilia from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
  • the room of the cartographies and of the farms
  • The room of the chemist and of the mercury fulminate.

 

However, the museum has much more to show you. After having visited the various rooms of the museum, it is time to go into the perhaps most important and suggestive part of the museum itinerary. From one of the distinctive concrete ogive that characterize the country of Campo Tizzoro you can go down in the air-raid shelters built in 1939 by the factory to secure their employees and their families in case of bombing. Once you reach 20m of depth, you can see the underground tunnels, which are among the largest refuges in Europe, and how they were set up and organized to allow people to survive underground even for several days. Inside there are the premises of the fire department, of the nurses, and of the teams trained to face chemical bombing. Finally, there is even a church.

 

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