Cold Steels and Vellums Museum

Museum of sidearms and of the parchments, è housed on the second floor of the Palazzo Milesi of Gromo, in Lombardy. The museum è open during the afternoons of every weekend and during the summer period, all days with free entrance. The museum è composed of three sectors:

• Weapons Room. Its frescoes tell which was the quality and the shape and the various characteristics of sidearms which were produced in Gromo and which markets were directed. Alternate various images, the seller and the buyer, the image of the Moro è surely the mostù surprising, authentic testimony that the market of the XV century had great horizons. The frescoes are comparable to a catalog today and served to purchasers who lied in these rooms in the expectation of sellers and notaries, to choose what would have been the weapons to buy. This makes it surely particular and unique this room, a sort of catalog to medieval wall, where the swords and halberds are shown both in their shape and the exact dimensions. Bulletin boards placed in the room contain the parchments: the first is the most important, the Instrumento of privilege, of 12 February 1267, document that gave autonomy to the municipalities of Gromo, Valgoglio and Oltreildragone. An Allegory of the elves intent to manufacture and to the forging of swords ago by decorative frieze to room.
• Parchments Hall. In a room on the left there are weapons inastate, realized in the fucine premises in the XV and XVI, of various shapes and sizes including halberds, Ronconi and spades. On the wall to the right is hung a map that reproduces the country in the previous date to 1666, the year in which the village suffered a disastrous flood that will crush every activity work on the manufacture of weapons. In cages are exposed different parchments carrying acts of sale and rent, and finally a document of the Republic of Venice dated 5 May 1677, eleven years after the tragedy, which grants exemption for a further five years to any duty or balzello toward the country.
• Cold Steels Mineralogy of Bergamo Area. Exhibition space dedicated to minerals needed to processes of sidearms, a space that connects the history from the mines, the forging of weapons, up to contracts of sale displayed in different cases.