Municipal Museum of Caxias do Sul

The Municipal Museum of Caxias do Sul is the city's main historical and ethnographic collection, covering the Italian immigration that defined the region from 1875 onwards. The permanent collection includes documents, photographs, tools, furniture, and everyday objects that tell the story of the Veneto immigrants who settled the Serra Gaúcha: where they came from, what they brought, how they built their new lives in a mountainous southern Brazilian landscape that was physically not unlike parts of northern Italy but culturally completely foreign.

The museum occupies a historic building in the city centre and is the best single place to understand the cultural underpinning of what Caxias do Sul has become — an industrial city that nonetheless retains a strong and specific Italian-Brazilian identity. Admission is free. Open Tuesday to Sunday.

things to do museum
A story
Among the museum's most striking holdings are the tools and household objects brought by the first Venetian immigrants in 1875 — carried across the Atlantic and then transported by foot or mule into the mountains of Rio Grande do Sul. The objects are mundane: cooking pots, farming tools, religious icons. But the distance they traveled, and what they represent about the people who carried them, gives them a weight out of proportion to their appearance.