The Museum

The Museum of Tasso family and Postal History was founded in 1991 and it is located in two historical buildings in the ancient village of Cornello.
Cornello was the birthplace of Tasso family and is known all over the world for the literary work of Torquato Tasso and for the business ability of some exponents of them who created and managed the European postal service for centuries.

The Museum is divided into four exhibition spaces and each of them develops and examines postal and Tasso family history.
Many documents, which are here collected, refer to the activity of services and postal history. Among the documents, there is a letter dated 1840  with the first stamp issued in the world: the famous Penny Black.

The rooms of the museum are so divided :

Room 1: dedicated to the family tree room of the Tasso family and to the documents about the family with early stamps.

Room2: dedicated to the complex organization of the postal service and the transport of mail and passengers. It’s possible to see some postal cards of 1700-1800 used by postal couriers and early tourists.

Room3: dedicated to the literary exponents of Bernardo and Torquato Tasso, the author of the “Gerusalemme Liberata”. The room is also dedicated to a collection of objects used for information transmission such as a leather mailbag, the telegraph, the early telephone sets and an Olivetti laptop of the Nineties.

Room 4: "Sala Mercatorum" dedicated to temporary exhibitions.