Introduction
In the last issue of Contexts and Debates, after an introduction on the advantages and perils of digital history, the first of three digital projects concerning antifascism was presented: the Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste (Atlas of Nazi and Fascist Massacres) (Cacciatore and Pizzirusso Reference Cacciatore and Pizzirusso2026). In this issue, the examples continue with IF – Intellettuali in fuga dall’Italia fascista (Intellectuals Displaced from Fascist Italy) and Memorie in Cammino (Memories on the Move).
A web project mapping the diaspora of Jewish and antifascist intellectuals from Fascist Italy
The research project ‘Intellectuals Displaced from Fascist Italy: Migrants, Exiles and Refugees Fleeing for Political and Racial Reasons’, directed by Patrizia Guarnieri, was launched in 2019 as part of the University of Florence’s Memorial Day initiatives. The results of this work in progress are published on the bilingual website http://intellettualinfuga.com.
The project aims to study the trajectories of peole coming to Italy to avoid political or racila persecution and, above all, ‘brain drain’, which occurred in Italy during Fascism and had significant consequences not only for the protagonists and their families, but also for the entire country. Reconstructing the paths of the intellectuals who emigrated because of dictatorship and antisemitic legislation, the website intends to bring to light the qualitative and quantitative importance of this phenomenon, which has been underestimated until now, or represented only through a few exemplary cases of great scientists and scholars, such as Enrico Fermi and Arnaldo Momigliano.
The core of the web portal is a database that has reached approximately 400 names. It is a provisional and open list, limited to those who by birth, residence, training or work had a connection with Tuscany: this choice was due both to the need to restrict the investigation for reasons of feasibility, and to the start-up funding offered by the Tuscany regional administration, but it would be advisable to extend the field of research to the whole of Italy in the coming years. This initial project, however, presents interesting features: it was characterised by the contributions of three universities and several cultural institutions, by Jewish communities and very active Zionist groups, by a notable and multiform antifascist context. Florence and other large urban areas were also traditionally home to various communities of foreigners of high social and cultural status (see, e.g., Garzaniti Reference Garzaniti2014), which between the 1920s and the 1930s played a role in attracting those who emigrated for political or racial reasons. Indeed, the project takes into consideration both Italians who expatriated and foreigners who settled in Italy, mainly to escape anti-Jewish persecution in the Reich and Eastern Europe and who, after 1938, were forced to leave their precarious shelters.
It focuses not only on academics, but in general on those who held high qualifications: the database includes people who, at the date of emigration, were students, recent graduates, temporary lecturers, public officials or professionals who had been struck off the registers of the Fascist trade unions and were therefore unable to work. The biographies cover a wide range of disciplines: if the largest group is by far that of doctors, several biologists, chemists and physicists are listed, alongside technicians and lawyers; in the humanities the fields of languages, classical studies, music and visual arts appear particularly frequently. The database, therefore, uncovers the submerged phenomenon of qualified scholars with disciplinary and professional backgrounds, who left alone or more often with their families.
The pages dedicated to each personal profile include an article that reconstructs the biographical events with particular attention to mobility, a timeline highlighting the stages through which these ‘lives on the move’ unfolded, a map that renders the spatial dimension, entries relating to migrant family members, informal aid activities, international relief agencies, and references provided in the applications submitted to these organisations. The photographic section has rapidly evolved to constitute a notable collection of hundreds of unpublished sources that have been gathered mainly thanks to contacts with heirs, often living abroad.
Particular attention is therefore paid to the mechanisms of emigration, including the decision to leave, procedures for expatriation, relations with organisations or informal networks that worked to obtain permits and find initial accommodation. Another important issue concerns stabilisation after emigration; reconstructing the stages of each individual ‘life on the move’ has made it possible to highlight much less linear dynamics than emerged from the historiography, from the available biographies and even from memoirs – all these sources are often unwilling to focus on difficulties, on temporary or definitive career downgrades, or on phases of precarious work. As an example, the archaeologist Doro Levi, one of the most qualified and internationally renowned scholars in his field, obtained after emigration to the USA only temporary assignments, at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton and then as a Guggenheim Fellow and as a member of the Roberts Commission (Fadelli and Guarnieri Reference Guarnieri2023), while other biographical profiles allude to a stable position at IAS (e.g. La Rosa Reference La Rosa2005).
These paths proved even more difficult for young people, for scholars at the beginning of their careers, or for those who could not count on a solid international curriculum. Difficulties were generally greater for women, who were more precarious, less visible and more conditioned by family choices. In fact, a female presence in intellectual emigration has emerged, which until now has been underestimated: the percentage of women (currently almost 23 per cent of the total) is much higher than the figures shown in available studies on universities (see, e.g., Martini and Sorba Reference Martini and Sorba2021) and in biographical dictionaries of intellectuals in Italy (see, e.g., Arru Reference Arru2016).
In the search for accommodation, family strategies gave priority to men, and thus married women, even if they had qualifications, were considered as wives to male intellectuals and professionals. Yet they played a central role in family mobility experiences, and some of them improved their education or started working abroad, driven by necessity and change. One interesting example is the story of Flora Aghib (Cavarocchi and Guarnieri Reference Cavarocchi and Guarnieri2019), who emigrated to the USA in 1939 with her husband Ezio Levi D’Ancona. Her contribution to this choice and subsequent steps was crucial, not least because of her fluent knowledge of English; after being widowed in 1941 she completed her education and found a job as a college language teacher. Single women were obviously more autonomous, but their social and professional integration was generally more uneven; however, they too were embedded in family and relational networks, and their migration stories intersected with those of their mothers, sisters and brothers, colleagues and friends. The research project highlights the need to cross-reference multiple sources to reconstruct their traces, as institutional sources are often lacking or incomplete. More generally, all the individual ‘lives on the move’ remind us that a great deal of work is required, collecting sources in different countries and in multiple archives, in order to grasp the complexity of their transnational trajectories.
The project pays close attention to the post-1945 phase, on the returns and re-integrations into the workplace, but also on the non-returns and their reasons, often linked to the severe limitations of the reparative process. Biographies such as that of psychiatrist Silvano Arieti (Passione Reference Passione2021) or anthropologist Tullio Seppilli (Buseghin Reference Buseghin2022) also allow us to reflect on another central question: how migrant scholars (even those who did not come back permanently) contributed after 1945 to introducing new disciplinary perspectives and to initiating a wave of internationalisation in the Italian academic system, after the delays accumulated during the Fascist regime.
On each biographical page, a graph displays the connections with other migrant family members. This visual tool highlights the connections that bind many of the individual life histories; one of the possible developments of the project could be the application of broader social network analysis methodologies, which would make it possible to exploit the large amount of information collected on each page. First of all, as in all migratory phenomena, the decision to leave and the choice of destination were due to the presence of family and friendship networks, which offered support by mobilising, for example, in the search for a first job, and represented the context in which newcomers settled. Second, foreign Jews – scholars and university students – oriented themselves towards those Italian cities where significant communities of compatriots already existed; the representation of these clusters could enhance the reconstruction of migration chains in different local scenarios. Finally, particular attention is paid in various biographies to transnational disciplinary and professional networks, which played a significant role especially for those who could count on a strong academic reputation: see, for example, the cases of physicist Bruno Benedetto Rossi (Guarnieri and De Angelis Reference Guarnieri and De Angelis2020) and classicist Henry Rudolph Immerwahr (Cavarocchi Reference Cavarocchi2020). In short, a broader cartographic analysis will help to represent the complex intertwining of individual life stories, and to better understand how personal and family social resources influenced the choice to emigrate and integration paths.
Predominant among the ‘lives on the move’ traced in the web portal are women and men recognised as Jews following the antisemitic laws of 1938, who then decided to emigrate abroad, mainly to the USA, Great Britain or Mandatory Palestine.
Regarding the different generational segments, exiles born in the first decade of the century – that is, over 30 years old at the time of the approval of the racial laws – seem to prevail, followed by the generation born in the decade 1910–19. People coming from abroad – which included, as mentioned above, a significant percentage of students – mostly belong to these two generational groups, while, among Italians, there is also a significant component belonging to older age groups (even 60 year olds, as was the case with economist Gino Arias) at the time of emigration. The project also focuses on the many children and adolescents who followed their families, and who after years abroad were the least willing to return to Italy (see the pages devoted to the Calabresi family as an example of this intergenerational dimension).
With regard to destinations, a large proportion of immigrants from Eastern Europe did not manage to leave Italy, as the prospect of expatriation drastically reduced in 1939, while new possibilities of emigration opened up only after 1945. Some were destined for internment camps, others decided to return to their countries of origin, and were mostly victims of extermination. It was mainly scholars coming from the German Reich who undertook paths of mobility, first towards the USA and Great Britain, given the possibility of relying on migratory chains activated in previous years, greater social and financial resources, and more attractive study curricula.
Prior to Klaus Voigt’s pioneering studies (Voigt Reference Voigt1989; Köstner and Voigt Reference Köstner and Voigt2009), the important historiographical tradition of Exilforschung had devoted little attention to the Italian case, given that the peninsula certainly represented a minor context within the great migration after 1933 (for a critical assessment, see Krohn and Winckler Reference Krohn and Winckler2012). The biographies collected in the portal help illuminate some interesting aspects of the Italian case: among them, the progressive shift of Fascist policies, which until the mid-1930s had tried to attract foreign scholars and students for reasons of prestige (Signori Reference Signori2000), and the tradition of intellectual relations, exchanges and Italienreisen, which involved especially artists or scholars of classics and art history.
Alongside the groups of Italian and foreign Jews, political émigrés represent a third, quantitatively minor component in the portal. Nevertheless, their stories bring to the surface a more complex phenomenon of expulsion than previously investigated, also on the basis of a periodisation covering the entire 20-year period.
The historiography agrees in emphasising the adhesion to the regime of the broad majority of intellectuals, both because a multiform strategy of patronage opened up the possibility of social promotion, and because they shared the project of politicising culture according to a nationalist and hierarchical perspective (see, within an extensive bibliography, Ben-Ghiat 2001; Salvati Reference Salvati2021). Italy represented a very different context from Germany, characterised by the 1919 fracture and the great intellectual emigration that involved those who had animated the cultural, artistic and political debate in the Weimarian democracy.
Even if we are faced with a quantitatively and qualitatively different phenomenon with respect to the political and intellectual emigration of German-speaking people, perhaps it is necessary to look more closely both at the complex (social and cultural) stratification of Italian political emigration and at the presence of a series of marginal figures who were gradually ousted during the ventennio, of whom we have lost track. In recent years, historiography has returned to the history of antifascist emigration (see Rapone Reference Rapone2008), asking new questions and attempting to interrogate the different dimensions of this phenomenon, which has traditionally been portrayed as a pyramid, consisting of a restricted elite of political leaders and a broad working-class base.
The portal contributes to this debate in several ways. First, it includes the biographies of some major personalities of antifascism, such as Gaetano Salvemini (Gussoni 2021), Carlo Sforza (Cacciatore Reference Cacciatore2022), Carlo Rosselli (Signori Reference Signori2022) and Emanuele Modigliani (Cherubini and Pinzani Reference Cherubini and Pinzani2021), focusing on mobility, family and solidarity networks, on paid jobs or other forms of income that made it possible to continue political activity abroad. It is interesting, for example, how much the figure of Salvemini appears in apparently distant biographies, testifying to his role as a weaver of relations in the various stages of his migratory experience. All these are complex, hybrid figures who elude simplistic categorisation, given that in their migratory paths they intertwined roles of political organisation, intellectual production, and editorial work aimed at spreading antifascist analyses and theoretical proposals across borders.
Moreover, it emerges, for example, that in the cases of Modigliani, Ernesto Rossi and his brother Paolo Rossi, and the Trentin and Rosselli families, the boundaries between antifascist and Jewish solidarity networks are not clear-cut; rather, they intersect in various scenarios. In some cases networks played a central role in the daily survival strategies of the newcomers, with their shared practices of welfare activism and their links with local political and aid organisations. Also, in the reconstruction of these milieus, it is crucial to analyse the gender dimension, since women often played an invisible but central role as ‘connective agents’, engaged in weaving and safeguarding relations and in various rescue and self-rescue initiatives (the case of Amelia Rosselli and her daughters-in-law Maria Todesco and Marion Cave in New York is perhaps the best known example). The biographies highlight both the complexity of these networks, with points of contact between neighbouring family groups, and their often extensive transnational dimension.
On the other hand, the portal gives some interesting indications of a series of little-known intellectual figures, intermediate in terms of career and generational placement, who chose to leave the country after clashing with the progressive tightening of repressive legislation and practices.
This is the case, for example, of Guido Ferrando (Guarnieri Reference Guarnieri2023), a professor of English literature and one of the founders in 1918 of the British Institute in Florence. A friend of Salvemini’s, from 1925 he was under surveillance by the political police during his frequent trips abroad, and he emigrated definitively in 1932, becoming director of the Italian Department of Vassar College in New York State. Another interesting case is that of Giuseppe Gentilli (Guarnieri Reference Guarnieri2020), assistant at the Institute of Geography at the University of Florence, who at the age of 23 refused enrolment in the Ethiopian campaign and was ‘declared ex officio resignatory’ for dereliction of duty; in 1939 he emigrated to Australia and, after a lengthy process of stabilisation, in 1947 became lecturer in Economic Geography at the University of Western Australia, dedicating himself, among other things, to pioneering studies in the field of climatology. These are figures whose vicissitudes have been expunged from the history of Italian universities and public memory, but who have left a visible trace in their countries of arrival. Their pathways refer to a dimension of progressive expulsion from Italian academic and intellectual milieus of figures who exercised various forms of dissent from the process of Fascistisation; it would be interesting to pay greater attention to this phenomenon, which has variable and blurred boundaries, but, as several biographies suggest, it could prove to be more complex than was previously thought.
Ultimately, the plurality of life paths reconstructed in the portal suggests new avenues of research and helps to question the traditional and excessively rigid categorisations between political and intellectual, Jewish and antifascist, and popular and elite emigration from Fascist Italy.
Through time and space, memories are always on the move
There is a little alpine house where we partisans live,
With courage, we fight for tomorrow’s Italy,
And the machine gun seems to say: let’s drive out all the traitors,
Nazis and Fascists, who have betrayed our honour;
We all have a family home, though far away,
Where our mother, whom we love so dearly, still waits and prays;
But here in the mountains, we stay and fight with valour,
Not seeking comfort, but only freedom …
These verses were written by Livio Cicalè and Guido Biagiotti, two young partisans from Macerata who were captured and killed by the Fascists on 17 April 1944. They were set to the tune of a song that was quite popular at the time, titled ‘Chiesetta alpina’ (Alpine parish). In the winter of 1943–4, the first winter of the Italian Resistance, the ‘201 Volante’ group of the 5th Marche Garibaldi Brigade adopted this song as their anthem.
This episode from the Resistance in the Marche region, more precisely in the Macerata area, was recounted by the courier (staffetta) ‘Stella Rossa’ (Red Star), the battle name of Nunzia Cavarischia, who at the time was little more than a young girl. Yet her 14 years were enough to understand what was happening around her in that autumn of 1943, so much so that she followed her father, Giovanni, into the mountains and agreed to carry messages, and even weapons, in the Chienti Valley, near the Sibillini Mountains.
A few years older than Nunzia, but originally from Anzola dell’Emilia in the province of Bologna, Adelmo Franceschini had a completely different experience. Called up for military service in August 1943, shortly after the fall of Fascism, he was assigned to the 6th Artillery Regiment stationed in Modena. It was there that he found himself on 8 September, the day of the armistice, and it was there that German armed forces captured him and his comrades. On the morning of 4 October, after a failed escape attempt, Adelmo and his companions were loaded into a cattle train (60 men per wagon) and deported to Germany to prison camps. Registered at Stalag III C in Alt Drewitz/Küstrin, near the Polish border, Adelmo officially became an IMI (Italian military internee). Liberated by the Soviet Red Army in May 1945, he managed to return to Italy only in the following September.
What remains from those two long years of forced labour in the German military industries are his camp ID tag (Figure 1), a postcard he sent to his then girlfriend (Figure 2), and the indelible memory of a young man who refused to resign himself to dying at 18.
Adelmo’s camp ID tag.
Figure 1 Long description
A rectangular metal ID tag featuring two holes at each end. The tag is inscribed with the text 'Stalag IIC' followed by the number '48737'. A dashed line runs horizontally across the center, dividing the text into two sections. The text is engraved in a simple, clear font.
Adelmo’s postcard to his girlfriend.
Figure 2 Long description
The postcard features printed German text, including 'Postkarte' and 'DEUTSCHLAND-Germany.' It has several stamps, one with the number '23' and another with a date '11-11-41.' There are handwritten notes across the card, partially obscured by wear and tear. The card shows signs of aging, with creases and a torn section at the bottom right. A printed message at the bottom left reads, 'Der Führer kennt nur Kampf, Arbeit und Sorge. Wir wollen ihm den Teil abnehmen, den wir ihm abnehmen können.'.
Like Adelmo, Raffaello Cei was also taken prisoner. However, he had known war much earlier. On 4 February 1940, Raffaello was called to arms, and when Italy entered the Second World War alongside Nazi Germany, his regiment, the ‘Celere’ Artillery Regiment, was immediately deployed first on the Yugoslav front and then, from January 1941, in the Italian campaign in North Africa – a series of offensives and counteroffensives along the northern coast involving Italians and Germans on one side, and the Allies on the other.
Raffaello has kept many photos from that period: images of himself, his comrades, the places they passed through, and the life of a young soldier at war in a distant and unfamiliar land (Figure 3). On 17 January 1942, in the area between the Egyptian locality of Sollum and Halfaya Pass, after 58 days of siege by the British army, the Italian troops surrendered, and Raffaello Cei, together with his comrades, was taken prisoner by the British Eighth Army.
Raffaello as a soldier in North Africa.
Figure 3 Long description
Raffaello is standing beside a small tent in a sandy area. He is wearing a military uniform and a cap. The background shows a barren landscape. Above him, the words 'Sirte Marzo 41' are written, indicating the location and date.
Transferred to Alexandria for disinfection and registration by the Red Cross, Raffaello then began a journey that took him from the North African coast all the way to South Africa, to the prisoner of war camp in Pietermaritzburg, where, assigned to the canteen, he remained until the end of the conflict (Figure 4).
Raffaello as a prisoner of war in South Africa.
Figure 4 Long description
A man is standing in front of several tents, with '1946 S.A.' written in the top left corner of the photo. He is wearing a sweater over a collared shirt and trousers, with his hands positioned behind his back. The tents are arranged in a row and the ground appears to be dirt or gravel. The man is facing forward and the tents have triangular shapes with poles visible in the background.
After the war, the repatriation operations for the more than 90,000 Italian prisoners of war proceeded slowly, and Raffaello was able to return home only at the beginning of 1947.
Very different is the story of Marietta Nulli and her family – a large and numerous family, all antifascists engaged in the Italian Resistance. On 12 September 1944, Marietta, affectionately called Mariuccia by everyone, was arrested by the German SS along with her relatives, taken to Verona, and from there deported the following day to the Gries camp in Bolzano. She was registered as inmate no. 4134, Block L, as she herself noted on the drawing she made of her cell (Figure 5). The internment of Mariuccia and her entire family in the camp was connected to the partisan activities of her sister Rosetta’s husband, Bruno Bonomelli, and his brother Paride, who were operating in direct contact with the Allies.
Marietta’s sketch of her cell.
Figure 5 Long description
The sketch depicts a cell interior featuring bunk beds on the left side, with blankets and pillows visible. A small window with bars is positioned centrally on the back wall, allowing minimal light into the room. To the right, a simple table holds a bowl and there are two containers or boxes nearby. The walls and ceiling are drawn with shading to suggest depth and confinement. The bottom of the sketch includes the text 'No. 4134' and 'Bolzano 20 September 1944'.
Another sister of Rosetta and Mariuccia, Agape, was already imprisoned in the Canton Mombello prison in Brescia because of her role as a courier in the ‘X Giornate’ Brigade of the Fiamme Verdi.
Lastly, there is Elena Ottolenghi, from Turin, Jewish. Her story began before 1943 and before Italy entered the war. It began in the autumn of 1938, when, as she herself recalls, her mother told her she would be attending a different school. And everything changed. It was the racial laws that changed everything, as shown by her school report cards (Figure 6).
Elena’s pagella (school report card). Next to her name was added, in parenthesis: ‘of Jewish race’.
Figure 6 Long description
The document is a school report card titled 'Pagella' for Elena Ottolenghi. It includes columns for subjects, grades and academic years from 1938 to 1943. Each row lists a subject with corresponding grades. Official stamps and signatures are present, indicating validation. The card includes personal details such as name and identification number. The layout is structured with a grid format for easy reading of academic performance over the years.
Nunzia, Adelmo, Raffaello, Mariuccia and Elena … stories of women and men in the spaces of antifascism, war and Resistance, told through their testimonies, documents and images of an Italy in transformation, between 1922 and 1945.
Memorie in Cammino (Memories on the Move) is all of this. It is not simply a digital archive, although it adheres to the methodological criteria of one, nor is it a collection of testimonies; rather, it is a virtual space in which one can walk among memories, sources from a collection that comes from all over Italy, and beyond.
Created in collaboration with Cassa Padana – Credito Cooperativo Italiano, the project was conceived by the Istituto Alcide Cervi, whose nerve centre is constituted by the Casa Cervi Museum, along with the Emilio Sereni Library and Archive and the Agro-Environmental Park ‘Ai Campirossi’, which inspire the themes of its many activities.
The Istituto Cervi, based in Gattatico in the Reggio Emilia lowlands, was founded in 1972 and is dedicated to Papà Cervi, an emblematic figure in the memory of the Resistance and the birth of the republic (Rovatti, Santagata and Vecchio Reference Rovatti, Santagata and Vecchio2024; Cerri Reference Cerri2023). For over 50 years, it has been actively engaged in scientific research and cultural promotion in the fields of rural history, democratic struggles, and the antifascist values that are the foundation of the Italian Republic, making innovation in these areas one of its strengths.
The symbolic and historical value of Casa Cervi has led to the formation of a wide community, comprising citizens, institutions, associations and organisations from across Italy that gather around this place, turned into a monument to the memory of the Seven Brothers, killed for their anti-fascist activities at the end of 1943 (Rovatti, Santagata and Vecchio Reference Rovatti, Santagata and Vecchio2024) and the testimony of Papà Alcide. Over time, these groups have renewed their commitment to this place, its story and its values. Today more than ever, all of them are ‘healthy bearers’ of extraordinary memories, witnesses and custodians of stories known only on a local level, sometimes even forgotten, stories of women and men who grew up under the Fascist regime, were involved in war in different ways and at different times, faced with choices that defined the fundamental experiences of antifascism, from civil resistance to the partisan struggle. This creates a true mosaic, forming a national historical identity whose meaning and depth can only be fully understood by experiencing these stories and memories in relation to one another.
To collect, preserve, connect and share with a wider audience this vast heritage of stories tied to the period between the rise of Fascism and the early years of the Second World War in Italy, the project Memories on the Move was born, a multimedia portal that places the source at the centre, offering an original and engaging way to read and explore it. Around the documents, photographs and testimonies, a network structure was built, a semantic and constantly geo-referenced web that connects different events and seemingly distant biographies, that brings together places and communities within the same historical context, and unites them in a journey that is naturally intuitive and immediately accessible through the website.
Memories on the Move is therefore configured as a public history project, embodying at every stage the key features of this discipline. A historical research project conceived and carried out outside academic environments, Memories on the Move was developed by a team that brought together diverse skills and expertise: not only historians, but also graphic designers, IT specialists, video makers and communication experts. From the very beginning of the editorial work, the public was involved in a dual role: first, as contributors of historical sources and testimonies to be collected; and then as recipients and users of the portal, where their memories gained value and meaning through being placed in relation to other stories, with other memories. This relationship with the public, in turn, triggered a ripple effect, activating new networks for the collection of additional material and further expanding the digital archive of Memories on the Move.
A key feature of the portal is the tree of Memories on the Move (Figure 7), which symbolically grows from the Casa Cervi globe (Figure 8). In addition to being the logo of the project, the tree serves as the main navigation tool on the website: the symbols and colours that compose it, the so-called ‘fruits’, represent a language that becomes familiar to users and allows them to create personalised paths of exploration, with the ability at any point to retrace their steps or delve deeper into a particular section. The biographies, events, glossary with keywords, map of places and timeline make up the fabric of this rich yet effective mosaic of memory, in which the sources (documents, photographs, archival footage and interviews with witnesses) are the pieces.
The logo of the tree representing Memorie in Cammino’s project.
Figure 7 Long description
The image shows a stylized tree with circular branches extending from a central trunk. The branches contain various circular symbols, including a flag, a group of people and a key. The tree appears to grow from a globe at the base, which is depicted with latitude and longitude lines. The design is abstract and uses geometric shapes to convey a symbolic representation.
The Casa Cervi’s globe, bought by the family in 1939.
Figure 8 Long description
The image shows a globe encased in a glass display situated in the center of a spacious room. The room features large windows that allow natural light to illuminate the space. Several columns are visible, supporting the ceiling and there are benches positioned around the room. The walls have a rustic appearance, contributing to the overall ambiance of the setting.
The Memories on the Move portal was launched online in June 2012, and after more than ten years of work involving the collection and processing of material, publication and technical updates, it now hosts over 2,000 sources, including documents and photographs, and nearly 150 interviewed witnesses from all regions of Italy. This digital heritage has enabled the Educational Department of the Istituto Cervi to develop teaching activities for students, experiences that are constantly updated to enhance the understanding of the past and encourage reflection and dialogue about the present. Through the study and analysis of selected written and visual sources, complemented by listening to video testimonies, students are invited to undertake historical investigations to reconstruct the past through the traces that have been left behind. These are ‘professional historian simulation’ workshops, where the primary focus is on working with sources to extract direct or indirect knowledge to formulate hypotheses, connect data, and reconstruct facts, biographies and aspects of society.
This type of workshop, already well established in the educational offerings at Casa Cervi, has found new momentum and material through Memories on the Move, expanding the areas of research and deepening knowledge, allowing students to engage with twentieth-century history in a more immersive way.
The type of laboratory proposals developed from the sources in the Memories on the Move archive can be inferred from the following example.
Premise
History is us. The events narrated in history textbooks are not just dates on a calendar; they represent moments that have shaped the course of events, both those of History with a capital ‘H’ and those of individual lives, making men and women the protagonists of their historical time through the choices they made or endured.
Theme
The Italian armistice and its announcement on 8 September 1943.
Objective of the historical investigation
To verify, through the reconstruction of witness biographies, the significance of the Italian armistice of 8 September 1943, and to explore how this event led to vastly different experiences and understandings.
Development
The class is divided into five groups. Each group is given a folder containing photographs and documents of five different witnesses. The task is to reconstruct each biography specifically for the period of the Second World War. These five protagonists represent different cases: an Italian soldier captured by the British in North Africa in 1942; an Italian soldier who survived the massacre of Cephalonia carried out by the Germans against the Italian army in September 1943; an Italian soldier who deserted after the announcement of the armistice and then joined the Resistance; an Italian soldier captured by the Germans and deported to prison camps in Germany; a young teacher who joined the partisan movement in 1944.
Five different biographies, five men from different parts of Italy, five lives marked differently, but equally deeply and significantly, by the consequences of the Italian armistice. Their paths never crossed, but today, comparing what they experienced, the choices they made and the events they endured presents a complex picture of history, which students learn through direct work on the sources.
In addition to the illustrated proposal, workshops have also been developed on the themes of daily life during wartime and the racial laws in Italy in 1938. A workshop on the role of women in the Resistance is also in preparation.
Memories on the Move therefore represents a valuable and effective tool for knowledge and further study, aimed not only at scholars and experts but especially at teachers, students, and anyone interested in history. The portal offers a wealth of useful information for precise and detailed research.
Over time and across space, memories continue to walk. They continue to reconnect the threads of History behind us with those of our history ahead of us.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
Nicola Cacciatore holds a PhD in History from the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). His work focuses on the relationship between Allied forces and the European Resistance to Nazi–Fascism during the Second World War. He has worked as a fixed-term researcher at the Universities of Florence and Padua. Currently, he is a researcher at the Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri, working on a project mapping the presence of Allied prisoners of war in Italy during the Second World War and their relationship with the Italian Resistance.
Francesca Cavarocchi is currently Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Florence. Her interests include Fascist foreign policy, antisemitic persecution, war and occupation in Italy, and Italian–German cultural relations in the twentieth century. Her recent publications include ‘My Air Armada: Italo Balbo’s Transatlantic Flights as a Multimedia Storytelling Machine’ (Forum Italicum 57, 2023) and La sorella latina. Diplomazia culturale e propaganda fascista in Francia e in Germania (Firenze University Press, 2024).
Gabriella Gotti is a public historian, responsible for the strategy, planning and co-ordination of the educational activities of the Alcide Cervi Institute in Gattatico (RE), as well as for the management, preservation and promotion of the documentary archives (Cervi Family Historical Archive), photographic archive and digital archive (Memorie in Cammino project).
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