Casa delle Farfalle (Butterfly House), Bordano

The 1976 earthquake wholly destroyed Bordano and its hamlet of Interneppo, on the right bank of the Tagliamento. The village then set out on a long effort of rebirth and promotion of its territory, with butterflies as its motif: from 1996 its house fronts were covered with murals, now numbering 231, 153 in Bordano and 78 in Interneppo, most of them devoted to butterflies.

The Casa delle Farfalle was founded in 2003 out of this wish to preserve the village's cultural and natural heritage. Set in the centre of Bordano, it combines science outreach, environmental education and nature tourism, and is run by the cooperative Farfalle nella testa.

Extension works carried out over more than a year later added a cafeteria, kitchens and a wing for the MUFFFA, the museum of butterflies and moths, which opened in 2020 to keep and display lepidoptera collections for research and teaching. Its collections, kept in climate-controlled rooms, exceed 100,000 specimens and nearly doubled in a single year with the arrival of the Giandolfo donation; the museum works with the universities of Udine, Trieste, Padua and Ferrara.

The complex closes every winter. The 2026 season opened on 14 March under the theme Ali alla Biodiversità (wings for biodiversity), with school workshops, guided excursions and entomological events.

The complex is organised around three large climate-controlled greenhouses totalling about 1,000 m². Each simulates a tropical setting: the African jungle, the rainforests of Asia and Australia, which the Italian Wikipedia article calls the Indo-Australian garden, and South American Amazonia. The climate is set so that butterflies can fly freely among the trees and plants of tropical regions, and so that visitors can follow every stage of their development, from egg to caterpillar and from chrysalis to butterfly.

Before reaching the greenhouses, the route passes through a museum devoted to animal senses, which explains how insects, mammals and reptiles perceive the world. The extension gave the site a wing where the MUFFFA collections are kept in climate-controlled rooms, together with a cafeteria and kitchens. Outdoors, the PolliNation trail, devoted to pollinators and flowers, extends the covered spaces.

More than a thousand butterflies of over a hundred species fly in the greenhouses, including members of the genera Papilio, Graphium and Danaus. They come from South America and Amazonia, equatorial Africa and South-East Asia, and share the glasshouses with exotic plants and other animals: mantises, the orchid mantis among them, stick and leaf insects, ants, beetles, geckos, chameleons, pythons and lorikeets.

Two permanent exhibitions accompany the visit: Farfalle. 4 vite, 1000 storie, on butterfly biology and the species of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and Gioielli a 6 zampe, where emerald-sheened beetles gleam. The MUFFFA holds more than 100,000 lepidoptera specimens.

The Casa delle Farfalle stands on Via Canada in the centre of Bordano, in the province of Udine; it closes in winter and reopens in late winter, as on 14 March in 2026. Allow one to two hours for the museum of the senses, the three greenhouses, the exhibitions and the PolliNation trail; the cooperative runs educational programmes from nursery school to upper secondary level. The visit can continue through the streets of the village, which lies between Monte Brancot and Monte San Simeone and is decorated with more than 150 murals, and on to Lake Cavazzo, overlooked by the hamlet of Interneppo.