Campi Salentina hosts a small museum dedicated to tobacco and tobacco women. It is an old tobacco factory with tools and work utensils inside, the payrolls of women hired to harvest or spin tobacco leaves, everyday objects of peasant life and some gems that will leave the visitor surprised and enchanted.
In one room you can watch the screening of a documentary dedicated to the subject. These are stories of song and pain. Salento is rich in songs that refer to work in the fields, and tell of the sacrifice of entire families, especially women, who in the morning picked tobacco and in the evening took care of spinning it. The most famous song of that long period of campaigning and sweat is fimmene-fimmene.
The dialect text, which reads “fimmene, fimmene, ca sciati in doi e ve ne turnati in quattru…” means: women, who go to the fields in pairs and return in four. Implying that in the absence of their husbands who left as emigrants to Switzerland or Germany, women were impregnated by the landowners, in a feudal and archaic milieu.
On a crate stands a strange nativity scene (the holy family) made with the sacks intended to contain the dried tobacco plant
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