“Domenico Dal Lago” Civic Museum

Fossils tell of a distant and mysterious past, and allow you to discover how the world was long before man came along. The museum becomes a place of encounter with the traces of the earliest forms of animal and plant life, and with the findings, which have been bearing witness to the presence and activities of man in the Agno Valley since prehistoric times. "Domenico Dal Lago" Civic Museum is divided into two sections, geological - palaeontological and archaeological, and stems from a large and mostly fossil collection, which Dr. Domenico Dal Lago donated to the City of Valdagno in 1929. There are about 13,000 findings, fossils, minerals and rocks, which come almost exclusively from the area of Vicenza; the environment of the past has been recreated through the study of territory and samples with its forms of animal and vegetable life. The archaeological finds of the museum come from the Alta Valle dell'Agno (the High Agno Valley) and represent human settlements across the region ranging from Lessini to the Small Dolomites. Housed in the historic Palazzo Festari, of the eighteenth century, in the heart of the historic centre of Valdagno, the museum includes a garden, called "brolo" (orchard), where you will see two large Sauri, wooden skeleton reconstructions of ancient reptiles, and the "living fossil" plants, which already existed in the times of the dinosaurs.