The Museum

The customs museum presents the tasks of the FCA and explains what the borders and border guards were used for, in the past and today.The building was constructed in 1904 and, until 1993, served as the border guard post.The first border guard post in Cantine di Gandria, the so-called “red house”, dates back to 1853; given the limited and uncomfortable space available to the guards, it was replaced in 1904 by a new, large building constructed a few hundred meters away. In 1935, the Ticino border guards’ officer Angelo Gianola decided to turn some unused rooms in this building into a museum: for the occasion he invited his colleagues to collect objects that would bear witness to the daily life of the border guards. In the first decades after its opening in 1949, smuggled goods, hiding places and imaginative means of transport were the most popular exhibits. For this reason, the Customs Museum is still popularly referred to as the “smugglers’ museum”.In the 1970s the museum was restored, revised and modernized in cooperation with the Swiss National Museum (SNM). The cultural commission of the SNM and the FCA agreed to transfer the entire collection of the Customs Museum to the SNM, also taking care of its preservation and topicality. From the year of reopening (1978) to the present day, the permanent exhibition has been continuously expanded, and the museum regularly hosts temporary exhibitions devoted to particular themes. Since the closure of the border guard post (1993), the building has been used entirely as a museum.