The Little Museum That Could

Minuscule but mighty, after knowing about it for some time, I visited the Piccolo Museo del Diario, or Small Diary Museum, in the village of Pieve Santo Stefano close the Umbrian border. The first of its kind in Italy, this nationally recognized museum houses over 10,000 autobiographical stories written by ordinary men and women about everyday things through the decades – really, an incredible snapshot of Italian history. Because is a repository for these personal history, only a small portion of these stories are shared with the public at any one time through interactive, immersive exhibits accompanied by a staff member.

Opened to the public in 2013, inspired by an idea from the late journalist and author Mario Perrotta, visitors can immersive themselves in the lives of ordinary people told through in their words, from an illiterate farmer from the Sicilian countryside who describes in exacting, sometimes humorous detail, the vicissitudes of his life to an Albanian woman now living in Italy who escaped an abusive marriage with only her children and stories that she finally had the courage to set down on paper. The centerpiece of the archive is the Clelia Marchi's Bedsheet, a farmer from a village in Lombardy, on which she meticulously wrote out her life story in Mantova on what was part of her bridal trousseau. Many of the collected stories are in paper form and, as they arrive in loco, are carefully archived grammatical errors and all. During our tour, the guide recounted the story of a partisan who had captured by the Germans before Rome's liberation and smuggled out inside his shirt collar torn pieces of paper on which he'd written what he and other prisoners had endured.

The Museum offers guided tours in Italian and English by reservation only. For me, having a knowledgeable guide to provide backstory on who the authors were and how their testimony arrived at the archive (kudos to the people and family members who held on to these precious testimonies) created a richer, more immersive experience. There are English-language subtitles for video displays.

The museum/archive holds an annual competition that selects the best first-person stories of new immigrants who come from every part of the world, many who recount harrowing tales of arriving in Italy by human traffickers who cross over from Africa; others who escaped extreme poverty or political persecution. Each regional commission (I belong to one formed in 2023) receives a selection of unedited stories that are distributed to all members (we're told to not place  emphasis on grammatical errors but on story content) who read them all and note each story's merits. We then meet as a group and discuss before arriving at our Top 5 that is forwarded to the national commission, which in turn names the winning submissions based on all commissions' recommendations. Winners are honored at a ceremony held in Pieve Santo Stefano in September and see their collective stories published in an annual volume. For me, it's been a privilege to read these heartfelt testimonies that are poured out on paper with so much emotion, heartbreak, despair, but also with hope. Their a snapshot into plights facing migrants across the globe and if only one listens or read their words of these living, breathing and worthy individuals, I believe we'd be in a better place right now.