A BIT OF HISTORY
The Luserna plateau has been inhabited since the Bronze Age, as evidenced by the remains of prehistoric furnaces used for copper melting and of artifacts discovered in archeological sites.
The settling of Cimbrian peoples, however, took place only from the beginning of the thirteenth century, with the arrival of settlers from Bavaria and some Tyrolean valleys, who began to till the soil and build scattered farms.
The first constructions were made according to the blockbau system, that is, with overlapping and crossed beams, and the roof was constructed with larch shingles held in place by large rocks.
The arrival of new families and the population rise required the construction of new homes; to build homes, wood was gradually replaced by stones, and new constructions were often abutting old ones.
Due to the lack of sand on site and the poverty of the inhabitants, there were very few plaster-cladded homes at least until the first half of the nineteenth century.
For this reason, the distinctive Luserna dwellings were made with large exposed limestone walls.
Homes were generally made up of a ground floor/basement used as a stable and storage facility, a residential first floor plan and the under roof used for storage of hay and foodstuffs.
A well-trod stone staircase, which usually ended in a wooden covered balcony, allowed access to the first floor.
THE HAUS VON PRÜKK HOUSE MUSEUM
The “Haus von Prükk” House Museum was born of the conservative restoration of an ancient house that preserved intact its peculiar nineteenth-century Cimbrian farmhouse features.
This was a particularly distinctive but decayed building; the work of the Kulturinstitut Lusérn consisted in the restoration of the entire structure and its original furnishings, making the dwelling a symbol of a typical Cimbrian home.
Located on Piazzetta C. Battisti/Pill, a small square in the heart of the village, the Haus von Prükk includes two separate buildings, erected at different times and with different construction features, which are developed across three and four levels, respectively.
The building to the north was built around the first half of the nineteenth century in two stages. The first stage saw the construction of a the basement (stables and cellar) and the first floor and a few years later, the building was elevated, resulting in much of the layout we see today.
Later work comprises the addition of wooden walls to the attic, which in the first years of the twentieth century were replaced by a similar stone structure, and the remake of the roof cladding with zinc sheets to replace the original larch shingles destroyed by fire in 1911.
It is not known with certainty when the house to the south was built. It was presumably erected in the first half of the eighteenth century. Archival research only shows that in 1856 the building featured those external elements that the restoration measure has once again brought to the fore.
The “Haus von Prükk” is a tool aimed at preserving the historical memory of the local community: a museum of folk tradition but also a place where, in warm summer evenings, stories of the past can come back to life and be passed down with the genuineness of the past.
Centro Documentazione Luserna
via Trento 6, 38040 Luserna (TN)
tel. +39 0464 789638
info@lusern.it
www.lusern.it
