Anghiari si racconta

I was born 50 years ago in Anghiari (the maternity ward here closed a few months later), and I grew up and went to primary school here. Then I went to a grammar school in Città di Castello – the only high school in Anghiari was the Istituto d’arte, so we all commuted to Sansepolcro, Città di Castello or Arezzo.

Until I was 14 I lived in Via Nova – it was a very small house, but I could see the whole valley, the Tiberina valley. I was an only child; my mother died when I was 22; my father remarried and now I have a brother, 20, and a sister, 11 years old. When I was a child, I spent a lot of time with my cousins who lived near the old centre. A big part of my family lives here, some uncles are in Florence. I have been living in Campo della Fiera for 36 years.

I have a very deep bond to this place … my family from my father’s side has always lived here. But there has also been an experience of diversity … I grew up in an evangelical family. I would say that everybody accepts the community which is 126 years old (and there are now about 20 of us) … I think that people in Anghiari are open to difference.

I went to university in Arezzo, majoring in Science of Education, studying pedagogy, sociology and psychology. After graduating I became very interested in storytelling and how it can be utilized in education. At that time, LUA was founded in Anghiari. I didn’t want to leave this place that I love, so I approached them about learning the autobiographical method and running classes, and I started collaborating on projects involving school children.

At the same time, I started working as an educator and social worker with Educativa di Strada, in connection with a youth service for drug dependency and prevention located in Sansepolcro. This was about stimulating young people to take responsibility, inhabit their places of entertainment in a safe way.

Through that work, a group of us became good friends and set up a cooperative – a private organization with funding from the municipality and other public organisations. Slowly, slowly things in the cooperative started to change, and I had more managerial roles. I started coordinating the education of children, supervising all activities. I like teaching, the educational relationship with another person but, when you are at the top, that aspect is more limited. I left the cooperative and now I have been teaching for 8 years, including, for a while, with disabled students in a high school. I’m currently working in Arezzo.

I started working on a voluntary basis with LUA in 2000 on a project with primary school teachers which involved grandparents writing letters to their grandchildren, recounting games from their childhood. They sent the letters to the schools, and then they came and read them. (At that time, there was also still a school in Tavernelle.) We organized an afternoon during which grandparents recreated their childhood games and the children played with them. There is a book from that project called Quando avevo la tua età [When I was your age].

There are many educational values to the projects involving school children and their grandparents: the affective relationship with grandparents, experiencing the emotions of grandparents finding themselves back again inside a school; the appreciation of all storytelling as unique, alive, not only something read in a book. There were children from Kosovo who didn’t have grandparents and the Italian children who had ‘too many’ grandparents lent them out to those children. So, they were learning the value of cooperation. Cooperate, donate, share memories. The project was also valuable for the community. For example, one grandmother said that she never left her house, but she came specially for this and was happy meeting people she hadn’t seen in a long time. People in the town talked about it – in a shop someone described me as ‘the Signorina who helps us tell our life stories’.

For 7 years, we have been working in collaboration with the library on a project for primary school children called ‘Born to write’. Surrounded by books, the children write their memories on different themes. The collaboration between LUA and the schools continues, but we also collaborate with the theatre, the philharmonic society, the library and other organisations in the territory.

‘Anghiari un borgo che parla’ is a new project aimed at creating a library of writings about places. It is an extension of the ‘Cherry tree’ competition we have been running for the past 3 years, for which people wrote about places with which they have a deep bond. We want to identify spaces where, via a QR code, you can listen to personal memories linked to those places. The idea is to transform writings into voices. The participants are all residents, not a big number, 8-10, of different generations, 30-70 years old. We are also thinking of interviewing people who are a bit older.

We are hoping that this project will develop a sense of community, and we are already seeing this: people participating might not know each other in a deep way, but, through each recounting their particular story, shared memories are resurfacing. Historical details are emerging, giving people a greater knowledge about the place they live in. The dialogue is generating a sense of belonging to a community.

On the website that comes out of this, visitors will be able to write a comment – it will be a dialogue with visitors. There is a lot of talk about quality tourism, keeping visitors longer and encouraging them to return. So, this project could contribute to that. With regard to visitors, people who do courses at LUA come from all over Italy, Switzerland, Spain …. For them, there is an indissoluble bond between LUA and Anghiari. Last year we asked people to tell us why they were LUA members, and what we received were love poems to Anghiari and its residents.

In terms of the future, it is disappointing to see the historical centre empty … it would be nice if there was some government assistance to help people to live there, as a community. Supporting quality artisans is very important but this shouldn’t be a matter of nostalgia … things change with the times. There are artisans doing wonderful things in Anghiari – there is a cultural richness in this village that needs to be preserved.

Sometimes I ask myself if I could live somewhere else. Sometimes coming home I drive a long way round so I can come along the road that looks towards the town. It is a metaphor: city walls opening over a valley surrounded by mountains. You start from a lower level and then climb up, feeling protected but with the need to go outside.