Materia Museum

The Materia Museum - Museum of the Art of Dyeing, Renewable Energy and the Environment - is located in Cantagallo, in the Prato Area.

More than a traditional museum, Materia is a tool for raising environmental awareness and a new way of communicating ethical, historical, artistic and technological content.

The museum offers the complete story of the textile industry in the Bisenzio Valley and Prato in general. Water is the undisputed protagonist here and is considered an essential raw material for all dyeing processes.

In the Middle Ages, the structure was used for production purposes and, over the centuries, it contained a three-millstone mill, a fulling mill, an ironworks, a copper mill and a rag mill. In the twentieth century, a carbonizing area and a dyeworks were added, while in the first decade of the 21st century, a small hydroelectric plant was also added and can be visited during a visit to the museum.

The two main experiential attractions are the Confessional and the Augmented Reality. The Confessional invites visitors to reflect on their own role in environmental pollution and to make a promise of more sustainable behavior, to be expressed out loud. The Augmented Reality is an installation that takes visitors on a journey through time, leading them through a medieval fulling mill, a 16th-century dyeworks and, lastly, projecting them inside the factory of Colle to show them a future vision.

In the basement rooms, known as "hell" because of the water wheels that were lodged there, you can admire a beautiful wooden horizontal mill wheel and the rare remains of a cast-iron turbine from the late 19th century.

The museum welcomes visitors by booking, offering a unique experience that reveals the secrets of Prato's textile history and innovation.