Macchina a Vapore - Museo Franco Risi

About the museum

The museum brings together the work of Franco Risi, born in 1934 in San Giovanni in Persiceto. Around the age of fourteen he built a working model of a steam engine; at eighteen he founded a metalworking firm, and at the end of the 1970s he returned to steam.

In 1980 he completed the restoration of his first portable steam engine, the Hofherr Schrantz Clayton Shuttleworth, which is still on display. Since then, over more than forty years of work using traditional techniques, the Risi family has recovered and restored a collection of about thirty machines.

The collection includes stationary engines, portable steam engines, locomotives, tractors, working machines and vintage cars, as well as thematic groups devoted to hemp processing, grain threshing and wood cutting. Many machines, used between the 19th and early 20th centuries for threshing, ploughing and draining land, are in perfect working order. In 2022 the museum received the ASI plaque.

Highlights

• About thirty steam engines fully restored
• Portable and stationary engines by English and Austro-Hungarian makers
• Narrow-gauge locomotive built in Berlin in 1909
• Mountain steam engine (locomobile) Italo Svizzera, built in Bologna in 1912
• Groups for hemp processing, threshing and wood cutting

Permanent exhibition

• La collezione di macchine a vapore – Stationary engines, portable steam engines, locomotives, tractors, working machines and vintage cars restored by Franco Risi.

Admission & discounts

Tickets can be booked by contacting the office.

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