Museo civico D. Dal Lago

The Dal Lago Museum, dedicated to the doctor Domenico Dal Lago and located in the elegant Festari Palace, leads the visitors along a trip in the past. It shows and preserves a lot of materials which tell the geological, paleontological and archaeological history of the Agno Valley. The historical collection, starting point of the museum, was given to Valdagno municipality by the doctor Domenico Dal Lago in 1929. There are about 13.000 items mostly fossils, included a little fossil crocodile.
Fossils, rocks and minerals tell us geographic and environmental changes of the territory of Agno Valley,  showing step by step the evolution of animals and vegetables that lived in those places: reptiles forbears of dinosaurs, snails, shells, see urchins, corals, sponges and different species of vegetables. The places, in the beginning inhospitality and dry, then were covered by see environments more or less deep until it became quiet lagoons with tropical climate.
The museum offers a tactile journey along all the exhibit space of section dedicated to geology and palaeontology, with inscriptions both big characters and Braille system. There are also available short guide books both big characters and Braille system.
The archaeological section collects and shows to advantage the specimens, which explain the long human presence in the High Agno Valley, constantly from ancient to medieval time. Festari Palace, in which Museum is located, has a little garden near a museum entrance; in this space several materials about geological history of the Agno Valley find place. In particular two woody reconstructions of "Saurian" catch the attention of the visitors: Velociraptor and Pteranodon, a flying reptile. They are surrounded by fossils specimens coming from all over the valley and by typical rocks of local layers. In the garden there are also two vegetables species called living fossils because they settled Earth for a period of over 200 million years and they survived in time without being subjected at any kind of adjustment. The stratigraphic pyramid lets visitors have e general and immediate picture of the plenty of valley, observing directly all the outcrops from Recoaro (Vicenza, Italy) to Montecchio Maggiore (Vicenza, Italy); at the end there is a panel which helps to find the most important geological and archaeological sites of Agno Valley. The D. Dal Lago Museum is part of Rete Museale Alto Vicentino.