The Beckwith schoolhouse-museums as places of memory

The Beckwith schoolhouse-museums, established in the 1970s as a transformation of the Beckwith schools of the Waldensian valleys of Piedmont, represent the peculiar yet meaningful history of the «colonel schools». At the same time, however, these small nineteenth-century schoolhouses, equipped with antique furnishing and teaching aids, have the power to embody and pass down the whole meaning of the concept of school for the Waldensian people. From being a place of early schooling scattered throughout the territory, the Beckwith schoolhouse-museums have become «places of memory» where history, identity and collectivity come together to form a whole and in which material space extends far beyond its own borders to become a symbolic space too.