Featured projects

All our projects

The storytellers we trained

Museum curators, educators and front-of-house staff

Museum mediators with a migrant background

Inmates

Italian citizens of different ages (young, adults, elderly)

Le opere e i giorni, Accademia Carrara e CSV di bergamo

Social and non-profit workers

First and second-generation citizens with an immigrant background

Unaccompanied minors

Being taken by the hand and guided across the exhibition rooms by the life stories of men and women […] is an eye-opening experience, showing us how the first, essential vehicle for a journey through the museum is not so much expert knowledge, as open eyes, mind and heart.

Emanuela Daffra, art historian and museum curator

“When we allow lived experiences (our own as well as those of others) to engage in a conversation with objects and their stories, the museum turns into an intimate place, where profound reflections may be exchanged, and objects acquire new meanings, which become part of our lives.”

Rosana Gornati, museum mediator
Activities and products

Our partner institutions

Gallerie degli Uffizi, Firenze

Uffizi Galleries, Florence

Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano

Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Accademia Carrara

Accademia Carrara Foundation, Bergamo

Chianti and Valdarno Fiorentino Museum System

GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo

GAMeC – Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bergamo

MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma

MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome

Museo Popoli e Culture del Centro Missionario PIME, Milano

Museum of Peoples and Cultures of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, Milan

Angelo Mai Library, Bergamo

Fondazione ISMU - Iniziative e Studi sulla Multietnicità, Milano

ISMU Foundation – Initiatives and Studies on Multiethnicity, Milan

Anteas - narrazioni

ANTEAS – Active Ages for Solidarity National Association

CSV - Centro di Servizio per il Volontariato, Bergamo

CSV – Service Centre for Charity Work, Bergamo

Formula Servizi per la Cultura

Our publications on storytelling in museums and heritage contexts

Lascio in eredità me stesso alla terra. Fare memoria tra volontariato e patrimonio culturale
S. Bodo, S. Mascheroni, M. G. Panigada (eds.), Masso delle Fate, 2021

I bequeath myself to the dirt. Making memory of volunteer work through cultural heritage is the result of a long journey started in summer 2020, when the Service Centre for Volunteering of Bergamo made a bold decision: to hold up cultural heritage as a “mirror” to local volunteer associations, who were dramatically affected both in their ability to keep providing their services during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and by the tragic death toll in their own ranks. Making memory of their treasured role in supporting local communities became imperative, so as not to see it fade away.
In the book, forty-six volunteers from as many associations gathered by seven thematic areas (environment, cultural rights, disability, immigration, poverty, health, third age) interweave their individual stories with the beauty of the land and its heritage sites.
Drawing inspiration from a verse by Walt Whitman, this great collective effort celebrates the legacy of a deeply rooted solidarity network, in Bergamo and far beyond.

Leaf through the book
Dipingere a parole. Storie circolari del Chianti e del Valdarno

Dipingere a parole. Storie circolari del Chianti e del Valdarno
S. Mascheroni, N. Matteuzzi, M. G. Panigada (eds.), Masso delle Fate Edizioni, 2019

Words for pictures. Circular stories in Chianti and Valdarno goes through the experience of six storytellers who reinterpreted the works of art they take care of every day, and described the deep connection with their living environment and cultural landscape. In this way, paintings and sites speak through the voice of their beholder, become a mirror to convey individual stories, interweave century-old stories with precious intimate memories. The integral texts of the six stories are accompanied by the essays of project team members and external experts (museum professionals, academics, theatre actors…), retracing the process and outcomes of the whole experience, highlighting the language of storytelling as a crucial vehicle to breathe new life into museum collections and heritage sites which are often forgotten or neglected, and reflecting on the potential of creating new connections between the story of artworks and individual biographies.

Leaf through the book
Go to the publisher’s website

Un patrimonio di storie. La narrazione nei musei, una risorsa per la cittadinanza culturale
S. Bodo, S. Mascheroni, M. G. Panigada (eds.). Mimesis Edizioni, 2016

A heritage of stories. Storytelling in museums, a resource for cultural citizenship was first envisioned as an opportunity to take stock and reflect on the growing impact of storytelling in cultural heritage interpretation and mediation processes, as well as on its potential to trigger a new awareness of the meaningful relationships that every individual can create with objects apparently as “remote” from daily life as those preserved in a museum.

This volume was conceived primarily as a work tool for museum professionals, educators and social operators working with adults in different contexts.

And yet, through the voice of its real protagonists, i.e. storytellers, A heritage of stories becomes a collection of stories which will fascinate every reader.

Go to the publisher’s website
Other relevant publications and essays