With the motto “ to know is to protect” the museum, institutionalised in 1979, has the aim of contributing to conservation, to the knowledge and to the evaluation of the natural environment in Lunigiana.

The exposure, conducted according to ecological criteria, describes and illustrates the most significant environmental aspects of Lunigiana, which are the mediterranean patch, the woodland, the chestnut groves, the beech groves, the cultivation in the vallay, in the hills, in the mountains, and the grottos.

The large amount of collected material, divided by themes which are about the physical environment, the rivers and the lakes, is illustrated with live animals. On the exterior, in the park around the fortress, is the forest, with a botanical garden of great interest.

Stele Staute Museum

The stele statues, built in Lungiana over a long period of time that runs from late pre-history to romanisation, are monuments of diverse type. Some are tied to a schematic or abstract process, others tend to be a realistic representation, and express a magic-religious concept of existence.

Relicts may be found on the shores of the Caspian Sea, in Romania, in Switzerland, in Corsica, in France, on the Iberic Peninsula, in the Camonica Valley, in Puglia, in Valtellina and in Alto Adige; a vast area, in which exists male and female anthropomorfic statues. The female idol reminds us of the mediterranean mother goddess, symbol of life and fertility; the male, often distinct by the representation of weapons ( scythes and javelins), a protector. The significance, the means, the place of origin, the cronology of the stele statues are still open problems because their discovery has always been made outside the archeological ground.

The Piagnaro museum groups together all the stele statues of the Lunigiana, either in orginal or in copy; the menhir of Tramonti, a subpyrimadial stone found on the hills which close to the east of the Gulf of Spezia, is gigantically present, at the top the stairs, almost rejoining the statuary anthropomorph to the actual megalitic phenomenon.