The Nativity Scene and Ethnographic Museum “Le Genti della Laga” was established in 2003 in Torricella Sicura, a foothill village of the Laga Mountains in the province of Teramo, originating from a thirty-year-long collection of objects belonging to peasant civilisation and from the artisanal work carried out by Gino Di Benedetto — a builder by profession, a passionate custodian and an ingenious creator of miniatures depicting the agricultural and pastoral life of the territory.

This undertaking belongs to a broader tradition of museography and Nativity-making in the mountain area, whose earliest significant precedents can be identified in the Living Nativity Scene and the Ethnographic Museum of Cerqueto di Fano Adriano, both conceived in the mid-1960s by Don Nicola Jobbi as part of a wider project of ethnographic collection — including intangible heritage — created to preserve local culture from dispersion and abandonment. This original experience, later reproduced in other villages of the area and inspired in turn by initiatives beyond the province of Teramo, increasingly contextualised the religious narrative of the Nativity of Jesus within a specific territory — that of the mountains of Gran Sasso and the Laga — reconstructing its customs and ways of life and drawing upon objects of material culture together with songs and sounds from local peasant traditions. Only a few years later, and in continuity also from a territorial point of view, came the initiative of the artisan Giovanni Gavioli from Montorio al Vomano, who from 1969 onwards gradually developed his miniature Nativity scene composed of workshops, peasant houses and shepherds from the surrounding mountains within a single dynamic mechanised setting animated through components obtained from recycled machinery, while simultaneously carrying out a comparable work of collecting objects belonging to peasant material culture, according to a complementarity that seems to accompany the common genesis of this kind of initiative.

Compared with these experiences, Gino Di Benedetto’s project developed in its own direction, becoming increasingly specialised in the meticulous miniature and mechanically animated reconstruction of an entire village — or perhaps, ideally, of an entire territory — crossed by electrical mechanisms that set artisans, farmers, shepherds and animals in motion, producing a detailed re-creation of everyday life in the hills and mountains. Initially conceived as a pragmatic solution to the lack of adequate exhibition space for the thousands of objects in the collection, miniaturisation gradually became the defining constructive and expressive feature of Di Benedetto’s work, multiplying over time into dozens of thematic scenes distributed across hundreds of square metres. These include the peasant kitchen with its bread oven; artisan workshops (the blacksmith, the shoemaker, the carpenter, the haberdashery, the grocery shop); agricultural work (harvesting, threshing, grape harvest, chestnut gathering); scenes of transhumance; the stable with its animals; village celebrations; weddings; burials; births; but also mills, construction sites and hydroelectric power stations, in a production continuously expanded and refined. Some scale reconstructions also reproduce real places from the surrounding territory: the church of San Bartolomeo in Villa Popolo, with its decorated wooden ceiling dating from 1684, and the copper workshop of Villa Tordinia, reproduced in every detail, where, until the second half of the 1980s, semi-finished products for the manufacture of copper utensils destined for the artisans of Tossicia and of the Chiarino valley were produced.

The installation is the result of a collective constructive practice involving, each year, woodworkers, stone artisans, textile makers, set designers and lighting technicians coordinated by Di Benedetto and driven by his passion for a museum that does not appear as a simple individual creation but rather as the cumulative product of an extended community motivated to restore visible form to its own memory. Human figures are handmade by Di Benedetto together with a network of collaborators who modelled and painted the faces, built the wooden structures and sewed the costumes. At the same time, the electromechanical animation of the scenes is created through adapted windscreen-wiper motors, introducing into the miniature a narrative dimension generated by gestures and movement. Many figures also hold small placards bearing dialogues in the Teramo dialect, restoring for visitors the social, relational and linguistic environment of the community represented.

The section devoted to the reconstruction of life-size environments, running parallel to the miniature itinerary, was instead formed largely through the recovery of objects from houses across the Teramo area of Abruzzo, abandoned during the period of mass emigration between the late 1950s and the 1970s, when entire peasant families left their rural dwellings. From the perspective of collecting, the museum therefore preserves an organic heritage of objects belonging to the agropastoral and artisanal material culture of the area: an olive press dating to 1695, almost three metres high; an animal-powered oil mill; complete equipment connected with shepherding and cheese-making; wooden looms, spindles, distaffs and tools for wool processing; an extensive section devoted to copper working and copperware, including water vessels, cauldrons and boilers; charcoal irons, traditional household linen and dowry textiles; an original collection of equipment once belonging to Nazi SS troops who occupied the territory in 1943; and numerous libraries of books on Abruzzo and the Teramo area, many of them recovered from the rubble of ruined or demolished houses. Within this accumulation of objects and reconstructed worlds, the museum exceeds the dimension of a traditional Nativity scene. It takes shape as a layered visual narrative in which ethnographic documentation, artisanal reconstruction and personal memory converge. The miniature thus becomes not merely a representation of the past, but an interpretative device through which disappearing worlds continue to generate relationships, recognition and shared imagination.