The Museum of School Notebooks has opened in Milan, the first in the world dedicated to childhood “between the lines”

What cover did your favorite elementary school notebook have? And have you ever reread your essays, the ones that the teacher asked you to write in cursive, with well-kept spaces? Did you keep them in the attic or did you throw everything away?

Now there is a space in Milan that has given itself the task of recovering ours school memories: it is in via Broletto, right in the center, and entering it is like taking a trip back in time to rediscover one's childhood and that of many children who lived before (and elsewhere) than us. The Museum of School Notebooks (here is the sitethe museum can be visited in small groups, by reservation only) is theunique in the world of this kind: keep a collection of over 2,500 documents, mostly primary and lower secondary school notebooks, written in that round handwriting that we all had as children. The oldest is a rare piece from the late eighteenth century (1775, to be exact, and it comes from England: it's the one you find in the photo at the beginning of this article), the most recent are notebooks written in pen in the early 2000s. In addition to the Italian notebooks, there are documents of over 35 countriesincluded China And Japan with their ideograms, which tell us about the world seen by children, in their blatant naivety, at every latitude.

The idea of ​​archiving this heritage of material history is Thomas Pololi who has been working on the project for about twenty years and who founded the association Open Notebooks where today a dozen people are active, together with other volunteers, a network of around 300 people, who work on the translations of the texts which Pololi then digitizes with dedication and patience.

Thomas Pololi, creator of the School Notebook Museum: it is located in via Broletto in Milan

Thomas Pololi

Once through the door of the Museum, on the first floor of a building a few steps from the Milan Cathedral, a room full of light displays some of the most significant pieces, divided by year and by theme: digital LEDs also allow you to leaf through some notebooks . We had fun reading the texts in the section #myself, dedicated to self-portraits, which opens up a universe on the frank and honest way that children also use to describe themselves. Very interesting – perfect for the news of these days – the section #propagandawhere we read texts written by English children who hear bombs falling near their homes or those by young Italians invited to sing the praises of their homeland…

Born as a blog that has already been able to collect many documents online, the project Open Notebooks has attracted the attention of teachers, pedagogists, scholars (including foreign academics) and the simply curious in recent years: the material continues to increase and the Museum of School Notebooks just opened (on Instagram it's here) has become the house of childhood voices of yesterday. Those who, before notes on the telephone existed, poured observations and emotions between the lines of their notebooks. You can read funny texts and surreal chronicles: take a tour and spread the wordbecause this is a project that deserves to grow further.