(first chapter: Ferrara)
Memory is not an abstract concept: it is a path that crosses archives, houses, stories, and faces.
And above all, it passes through the new generations.
In the European project Le Case di Micòl, funded by the CERV programme, memory becomes a concrete experience — a process of research, listening, and storytelling involving students from film schools and secondary schools across the four participating countries: Italy, Belgium, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
This shared, international educational approach is the foundation of the “Bearers of Memory” workshop.
A European laboratory of active remembrance
Each partner film school has selected a secondary school in its own country.
Workshops are taking place simultaneously, guided by historians, teachers, and experts who contributed to the research behind the “Houses of Micòl”, alongside the filmmakers producing the project’s short films.
Students are not just recipients of knowledge: they are its authors.
They analyse documents, reconstruct biographies, reflect on the Shoah and on present-day discrimination, and learn to translate all this into narrative form — articles, interviews, reflections, and visual or written materials.
These contributions will become part of the project’s official blog, creating a European narrative archive written by young people.
The first chapter: Ferrara
Ferrara, the project’s lead city, is the first to launch the workshop.
The school involved is the Istituto di Istruzione Superiore Luigi Einaudi, a long-standing educational partner in initiatives dedicated to memory and civic education.
The lessons are led by:
- Prof. Michele Ronchi Stefanati
- Prof. Eleonora Bentivogli
With their guidance, students are exploring the stories of the four Ferrara-based Micòls identified by the project — and the houses where they lived their last happy moments, now part of the Le Case di Micòl digital platform.
The workshop includes archival research, reading of historical sources, exchanges with filmmakers, and creative and critical writing sessions, allowing each student to develop and express a personal point of view.
Students as narrators of memory
The workshop is designed to transform learning into storytelling.
Each student will produce an original signed contribution — an article, an interview, or a personal reflection — to be published on the project’s blog.
Their voices, diverse in tone and background, will form a living and plural memory capable of speaking to their peers across Europe.
The first contributions from the Einaudi students will be published soon, inaugurating this new section of the blog.
A practice of European citizenship
Bearers of Memory is far more than a school activity:
it is an exercise in citizenship, responsibility, and civic imagination.
In a Europe marked by identity conflicts and new forms of discrimination, the young people involved in the project are learning to practise active remembrance — to recognise the signals of the past in order to better understand the present.
And this experience does not end in Ferrara.
Workshops have already begun in the secondary schools selected by the other European partners, expanding the mosaic of voices, languages, and narratives that will build a shared memory of our “Micòls” across Italy, Belgium, Poland, and the Czech Republic.