I piccoli musei della scuola dell’arco alpino tra iniziative di storia pubblica e promozione dell’identità locale

The paper aims to study the small museums of the Alpine School as sites for building a local history of the school, shared with the population through the creation of exhibitions, the reconstruction of the biographies of historical teachers of the country, the collection of oral sources on the school experiences of the inhabitants, campaigns to collect photographs or school supplies to be displayed more or less temporarily in exhibition cases, etc. The research, therefore, focuses in particular on public history initiatives – that is to say, on “bottom-up” participatory history, with the contribution of non-professional historians – promoted within museums located on two distinct sides of the Alps: the Trentino and Alto Adige, on one side, and the Piedmont, on the other. These “places of school memory” are not simple exhibition spaces, but local identity elaboration spaces, able to aggregate around themselves real “communities of memory” and to contribute significantly to the social and cultural resilience of communities in areas at high risk of depopulation. The people who visit these museums are not only visitors, mere spectators of a representation of their school past, but rather co-authors of a great collective narrative, shared with the other members of their own community.