Memories from the sea at the Piccolo Museo del Diario. Personal stories that have become collective and universal stories

The fourth online training meeting of the 2021/2022 Ocean Schools academic year invites teachers of all levels, educators, and cultural mediators to get to know the Piccolo Museo del Diario. The museum was created in 2013 to tell the story of the National Diary Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano (Arezzo, Italy), a non-profit cultural institution that welcomes, reads, categorizes, and digitizes diaries, making them available for research, studies, screenplays, articles, and publications.

This is an intense multi-sensory and interactive journey that welcomes visitors in an engaging and innovative way, leading them by the hand through the writings of ordinary people who have documented the history of Italy from a completely new point of view. They represent private memories, which started as individual and personal stories but have have become both collective and universal, thereby merging and intertwining with History with a capital H, and helping us talk about the idea of “history written from below”.

Speaker: Natalia Cangi, Director of Piccolo Museo del Diario.

The meeting is reserved for teaching staff of all levels, educators, and cultural mediators.

Participation is free with compulsory registration by signing up here.

The meeting will be held only online via Zoom. The link to connect to the training meeting will be sent to participants on Thursday March 24.

The National Diary Archive, founded in 1984 by ​​the journalist and writer Saverio Tutino, is a non-profit cultural institution that welcomes, reads, categorizes, and digitizes diaries, thereby making them available for research, studies, screenplays, articles, and publications.

A stronghold to safeguard memories that have become a source of inspiration for films, theater productions, and other forms of art such as music and photography. The unpublished texts participate annually in a selection for the “Pieve Saverio Tutino Award”. The heritage of the Diaristic Archive Foundation, which has obtained the notification of cultural interest (as per the Code of Cultural Heritage), consists of over nine thousand autobiographical writings. Among these are the testimonies of people who lived at sea: the logbooks, the adventures aboard cruise ships, the experiences on fishing boats, and the memories of those whose experience at sea meant changing cities, changing continents, and changing lives.

The “Piccolo Museo del Diario” was opened in 2013, and is an intense multi-sensory and interactive journey created to tell the story of the National Diary Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano, and the precious autobiographical testimonies it preserves. A museum itinerary that welcomes visitors in an engaging and innovative way, leading them by the hand through the writings of ordinary people who have documented the history of Italy from a completely new point of view. They represent private memories, which started as individual and personal stories but have have become both collective and universal, thereby merging and intertwining with History with a capital H, and helping us talk about the idea of “history written from below”. This is the story of a whole country, and within these texts, its purest, most everyday, most sincere, and most honest identity can be found. Stories, memories, letters, and diaries that eliminate the filters of rhetoric, and which help us understand the world we live in, our country, and our society.