Perhaps not everyone knows that Media Valtellina is not only known for sports or food and wine, but is also the ideal destination for those who want to spend a mountain vacation in contact with nature and culture. This territory, in fact, is rich in numerous museums that offer visitors ideas and curiosities to make a real journey into the past and discover the history, art and ancient traditions that have always characterised it.
The Media Valtellina offers a wide choice: house-museums and ancient mills, art museums and ones for skiing, ethnographic museums and open-air museums, where adults and children can, thanks to organized guided tours, spend a day discovering the cultural heritage and hidden treasures that are kept in each of them.
Among the museums with the aim of collecting, preserving and valorize the anthropological evidence of our territory, not to be missed is certainly the MET - Ethnographic Museum of Tirano that, founded in 1973, explains the ancient traditional farming and handcraft activities of the valley, shows perfect reconstructions of family environments and exhibits typical tools and instruments of the past. In Aprica two stops should not be missed: the Ski Museum that, founded by Elio Negri in 2006, tells the history of this sport; especially the evolution undergone by the equipment from the first models of the early 20th century to the most modern equipment is shown by more than 800 pairs of skis, old boots and ski sticks; the Murales, coloring the facades of the houses of the quarter of Santa Maria, San Pietro and Dosso, create a true open-air art gallery, with three different thematic routes: history of Aprica, alpine vegetation and local fauna. By reservation it is possible to visit in Grosotto a huge eighteenth-century wine press, and in Teglio the complex of the ancient water mill Menaglio, that host a small museum as well as an ancient mill for grinding buckwheat and rye.
