Nello Cassata Ethnohistory Museum, Ethnographic museum in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, Sicily, Italy

The Nello Cassata Ethnohistory Museum is an ethnographic museum in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto housed in a large late-1800s building. The collection contains about 3000 objects, including reconstructed craft workshops, traditional household items, tools, and early machines that document daily life and work in Sicily.

The museum opened to the public in 1995, based on collections begun by Nello Cassata, a lawyer and cultural enthusiast who started gathering Sicilian objects in the mid-1900s. His son Franco, a high-level court official, helped expand the collection until its opening by the Oikos Institute.

The museum takes its name from Nello Cassata, a lawyer and dialect poet who began collecting in the mid-20th century. It stages study conventions and festivals with storytellers, puppet theatre and classical and dialect theatre, and keeps a library on anthropology and Sicilian history open to the public.

The museum occupies a 1,500-square-metre site that includes the late-19th-century Casa di Manno, the Cassata family's country residence, with a garden of rare Sicilian and Mediterranean plants. On site there is also a restoration workshop giving educational courses, plus a refreshment point with a bookshop. The Oikos Institute, a non-profit with about thirty staff, runs the museum and its library of anthropology and Sicilian history, open to the public.

The collection began with bone spoons that shepherds used for meals during mountain grazing, gathered by the lawyer Nello Cassata from the mid-20th century. His son Franco, General Counsel at the Appeal Court of Messina, helped him expand it into the 20,000 catalogued finds now held in about 45 reconstructed workshops.