Connecting our cultural heritage, especially that considered of less importance, with the world of school has always been the mission of INDIRE, the research body of the Ministry of Education. In this video, Pamela Giorgi, researcher at Indire, interviews Maria Cleofe Filippi, president of the National Network “The landscapes of memory”, on the didactic use and educational purposes of a particular type of cultural heritage, the one that refers to the symbolic places of the Resistance. «The landscapes of memory is a network of Italian places of memory, created in 2017 and involving 31 places in 9 different regions of the country. The purpose of the Network is to give an identity of its own to the concept of memory, resulting from the knowledge of the history of these places» Maria Cleofe Filippi declared. In each of them, in fact, important episodes related to our Resistance took place during the Second World War: reprisals, massacres, detentions. Some are better known, others only at local level, but in recent years, the associations that preserve these places have created specific didactic paths, which allow teachers to reconstruct – even visually – the events that occurred in these places, preserve their memory and pass it on to the new generations.

Telling the Italian Resistance through the Landscapes of Memory and the educational potential of these symbolic places in the history of our country. Beatrice Verri, Director of the Nuto Revelli Onlus Foundation, talks about this in this interview by Pamela Giorgi, Indire’s researcher. The homonymous Foundation, founded in 2006, based in his home in Cuneo, is dedicated to the writer Nuto Revelli, Alpine in Russia during the Second World War, and partisan of Justice and Freedom. Together with the Foundation the project for the recovery and enhancement of the Borgata Paralup also started. This was a mountain village at 1400 meters in the Stura Valley, which was the headquarters of the partisan group Italia Libera, where Nuto Revelli and other 200 young twenty-year-olds from all over the country, gathered to become partisans and contribute to the fight against Nazi-fascism. “This place is very suitable for addressing young people, students in particular, because today that the direct witnesses of that struggle are no longer here, places take on a particular meaning, becoming the new witnesses” Beatrice Verri declared.

Gianluca Cinelli is Research Coordinator of the “Memoranda” project and collaborator of the Nuto Revelli Foundation, the importance of showing the places of everyday life in which dissent and then political resistance have developed. Nuto Revelli’s House of Memory is at the centre of an articulated network of other houses and places, all at the centre of the Memoranda project, which not only wants to create mere museum houses, but real dynamic spaces, which also through IT tools (such as Nuvolar) would exploit the knowledge potential of an archive, not only in terms of information reception, but also participation.

Renato Grimaldi, professor at the Department of Philosophy and Sciences of Education of the University of Turin, adds an interesting piece to the path we are developing on the “Landscapes of memory”, using an unusual cultural heritage: the painted votive tablets, that is, votive offerings, through which he tells the story of the Banda Balbo, the famous second Langhe Division of the Northern commander, and their locations. “Now it is up to us to revive these landscapes of memory”, the professor tells us, also telling of a special “treasure hunt” made with some primary school students, through the images of the ex-votos. At this link you can download the volume by Renato Grimaldi “Ex voto d’Italia. Strategie di comportamento sociale per grazia ricevuta”, Franco Angeli editore
http://ojs.francoangeli.it/_omp/index.php/oa/catalog/book/603

Cristina Clerico, councilor for culture of the city of Cuneo, takes us to another stage in the landscapes of memory, illustrating the educational and training potential of the house museum of the hero of the Italian resistance, Duccio Galimberti. In the video there is also a brief tour of other emblematic places in the city of Cuneo: such as, for example, the civic library; the point where some civilians suspected of belonging to the forces of opposition to Nazi-fascism or “guilty of being Jews” were massacred, and much more.

Renato Grimaldi, professor at the Department of Philosophy and Sciences of Education of the University of Turin, adds an interesting piece to the path we are developing on the “Landscapes of memory”, using an unusual cultural heritage: the painted votive tablets, that is, votive offerings, through which he tells the story of the Banda Balbo, the famous second Langhe Division of the Northern commander, and their locations. “Now it is up to us to revive these landscapes of memory”, the professor tells us, also telling of a special “treasure hunt” made with some primary school students, through the images of the ex-votos. At this link you can download the volume by Renato Grimaldi “Ex voto d’Italia. Strategie di comportamento sociale per grazia ricevuta”, Franco Angeli editore
http://ojs.francoangeli.it/_omp/index.php/oa/catalog/book/603

The politologist, sociologist, historian, academic, political activist, journalist, essayist and president of the Nuto Revelli Foundation, Marco Revelli, tells us about the didactic value of the Paraloup hamlet, the birth place of the first partisan group of the movement “Justice and Freedom”, led by Duccio Galimberti, with prominent personalities, such as Dante Livio Bianco, Nuto Revelli, Leo Scamuzzi, who were destined to become the protagonists of the liberation struggle. Paraloup not only marks a significant stage in the Path of Memory in relation to the history of the Italian Resistance, but it is also part of that complex narrative of the suburbs, mountain and rural areas, gradually depopulated as a consequence of the economic boom.

Antonella Tarpino is vice president of the Nuto Revelli Foundation and creator of the Memoranda project, with a poetic approach focused on the value of testimony, on the transmission of true stories, avoiding reducing history to subjectivity. She tells us what lies at the origin of the Memoranda project, based on giving meaning to places of memory and domestic stories, and how personal history is connected to the larger history of our country and what is the value of this cultural operation.

Historian and Director of the Tuscan Historical Institute of the Resistance and of the Contemporary Age, he talks to us about how the archival and bibliographic heritage (usable both analogically and digitally) owned by the Network of Historical Institutes of the Resistance, located all-over the national territory, can be used didactically; and the contribution that this cultural heritage can give to the construction of skills in the field of historical disciplines and, more broadly, of Civic Education.

Orlando Baroncelli, historian and essayist, traces the stages of a hypothetical didactic path between archival papers and places of memory of the Resistance: for a detailed and workshop-based account of the liberation of the city of Florence

Gigi Garelli, director of the Historical Institute of the Resistance of the province of Cuneo, talks about the possible didactic-educational uses of the historical memory contained in the concentration camp of Borgo San Dalmazzo, one of the concentration camps established in Italy after 8 September 1943 to group together the Jews destined for deportation.

Learn more at:

https://www.fanpage.it/attualita/qui-ebrei-scritta-a-casa-del-figlio-di-lidia-rolfi-deportata-nei-capi-di-sterminio-nazisti/

Alessandra Celi, a member of the Italian Society of female Historians, has been dealing for years with the issue of gender equality in relation to teaching (she recently published “I secoli delle donne. Fonti e materiali per la didattica della storia” (Bellucci F, Celi A, Gazzetta L, Biblink 2019). As part of the “Landscapes of memory” project, starting from an episode that saw the women of the city of Carrara involved on 7 July 1944, she talks to us about how the Resistance can be observed from a gender perspective, in a reading that intertwines official sources and private memories.

Stefano Oliviero (UniFi) talks to us about the meaning and potential of the didactic and, more broadly, educational use of the cultural heritage linked to the places of the resistance.

Director of the Historical Institute of the Resistance of Macerata, she talks to us about the places of resistance and the prison camps located in the Marche, with particular reference to the role of women.

Historian and essayist, he talks to us about how the landscape can be useful for telling the story: the prison camps in the Macerata area, starting from the detail of Villa Spada.

Historian and essayist, he tells us about the Elcito castle, a stronghold of the Macerata resistance, and the multi-ethnicity that characterized the ‘Mario’ brigade.

Teacher and historian, he talks to us about the stories and places of the priests who were protagonists of the Marche resistance.

The Royal Decree Law of 5 September 1938 sanctioned the exclusion of people of ‘Jewish race’ from schools: teachers, pupils and auxiliary staff. 5 years later we interview Professor Patrizia Guarnieri, professor of Contemporary History at the University of Florence, talks to us about the project “Intellectuals fleeing from Fascist Italy. Migrants, exiles and refugees for political and racial reasons” which has made photographic, audio and documentary materials available on a special web page: available for scholars, teachers and students. Learn more at: https://intellettualinfuga.com/