In the heart of the province of Parma is one of Italy’s most ancient petroleum extraction areas, founded in the early 1900s and no longer working. In 1996 a passionate private owner proposes the area as a subject of study for the realization of a vast museum.

The hamlet of Vallezza, with its new hypogeum museum built on the previous site of a prefabricated barn, is the educational park’s focus point and the starting point for walks in the woods aimed at discovering old industrial relics.

The idea itself of the underground museum finds confirmation in this area.  The underground spaces of the museum are marked by walls which cut into the ground, and receive its visitors on a fact-finding itinerary ‘within the earth’.

The hamlet of Vallezza, entirely redeveloped, rediscovers the reason why its location is so central. The extraction area is handed over from above as a whole to the visitor, and the territory becomes a well known and understood landscape.