Museo di Castello di Rivalta

On the Piacenza Apennines, along the left bank of the Trebbia River in the hamlet belonging to the municipality of Gazzola, stands the Castello di Rivalta, a fortified complex (15th–18th centuries) owned by the Zanardi Landi family and included in the network of the Castelli del Ducato di Parma, Piacenza e Pontremoli. The American collection of Ermanno Stradelli, preserved and partly displayed at the Castello di Rivalta, consists of about sixty ethnographic artifacts and animal remains gathered between 1881 and 1891 among Indigenous peoples living in the Amazonian region of the Rio Uaupés and its tributaries. These objects do not represent the entirety of the original collection—made up of more than 189 artifacts—but belong to the group sent to Italy to be included in the Esposizione delle Missioni Cattoliche Americane held in Genoa in 1892. Once the exhibition had closed, the Stradelli collection was probably retrieved by one of Ermanno Stradelli’s relatives and brought to the Castello di Rivalta, where it is displayed in a small case in the “Sala delle esplorazioni e arte sacra.” Some objects still bear the original labels from the Esposizione delle Missioni Cattoliche Americane, with the numbers corresponding to their descriptions in the catalogue—an important element for reconstructing the collection’s history and for the identification of the artifacts. Other items carry labels with Indigenous names written by Stradelli himself during his long years of research and exploration in Amazonia.