Chimney Sweep Museum of Santa Maria Maggiore

The museum tells, through an installation of materials, music, sounds and sensations, the hard experience of the chimney sweep, which has marked the life of the Vigezzo Valley for centuries. The first chimney sweeps ever were the Vigezzini, who we find around Europe in the first half of the 1500s. The contribution of children has always been decisive in this profession, who, with their slender stature, managed to slip on hoods and to ensure accurate work with the rasp and brush. The phenomenon of the "little rusca", the chimney sweep children, involved, particularly in the decades between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most of the Vigezzo families, forced to "rent" at least one of their children to the "masters". Hundreds of little ones aged six or seven found themselves doing the season (from September to April) and spending Christmas away from home, among the fumes, the frost and the mists of the plain or "low", the term with which they indicated their working area.

Parents subjected their children to this harsh experience in order to have one less mouth to feed during the long winter. It was, that of the little Rusca, a life of toil, deprivation and suffering since their masters, with rare exceptions, were cruel and did not spare the mistreatment. The phenomenon of small rusca ended between 1940 and 1950 with the disappearance of fireplaces, replaced by stoves and modern heating systems.