The Museo Carnico delle Arti Popolari “Michele Gortani”,  museum of popular arts specially devoted to local arts and crafts, is the result of the patient research and gathering activity of  Sen. Gortani (1883-1966) – to whom the Museum is entitled –  all over the Carnia historical-geographical region starting from 1920 on.
The exhibition is located in Palazzo Campeis, a building erected in the 18^th century. The objects, all of which endowed with important ethnographic features, encompassing all the issues related to the common life and the traditions of the Carnia region through a timeline running from the 14^th to the 19^th century, find pace in thirty halls. The layout of a part of the collection follows the criterion of reconstructing a domestic scene. The visitor can so admire the kitchen, the bedroom, the “tinello” (a small, elegant dinette /living-room), the workshop of the coppersmith, who also used to manufacture brass objects, and the joinery.
Special sections expose wrought-iron handworks, tools for handcraft productions and objects used in livestock farming, popular clothes and dresses, carved wooden masks, tools for weaving activities, pottery and manufacturing of the “bronzìns”, three-legged brass cauldrons.
We wish to outline here the excellence of the collection of hand-woven fabrics and embroidered cloths gathered and exposed in this Museum. A bright light is shed over a noteworthy tradition and very special skills nurtured over the centuries in this mountain area and then spread over worldwide.
The gallery of portraits contributes to enhance knowledge of the social history concerning people of Carnia.  An entire hall contains memories of  the popular religiousness, thus testifying how the religious instances are absolutely important for a full understanding of the local traditions that still mark the rhythm of everyday’s life.
The abundant and qualified witnesses gathered in the Museo Carnico make it one of the most important and rich ethnographic museums in Europe

Site of the Museum