Il Municipalities Project preserves and enhances the stories of families who have left Italy, stories that risk being lost.
In every Italian municipality, there are stories waiting to be told. Stories of families who, during the decades of the great exodus, from the late 19th century to the 1960s, left their hometowns, crossed oceans, and built new lives elsewhere. Stories passed down by word of mouth, surviving in the memories of the elderly, preserved in yellowing photographs tucked away in drawers in distant homes.
These stories are an extraordinary cultural, historical, and emotional legacy. But they are fragile. Every elder who leaves carries with them a piece of memory that no book or archive has managed to capture. Every diaspora family that assimilates into the culture of the host country distances itself a little further from its ties to its homeland. The Comuni Project, through the tools of memory and genealogy Developed by the Italiani.it Foundation, it works to preserve this heritage and make it accessible—both to communities abroad who want to rediscover their roots, and to municipalities that preserve that history and can use it as a strong element of their identity.
The Virtual Museum of Italian Emigrants
The heart of this work is the Virtual Museum of Emigrants Italian, a unique digital space in Italy dedicated to collecting, showcasing, and narrating the stories of diaspora families. Unlike physical emigration museums, which exist throughout Italy, the Virtual Museum is unconstrained by space and distance. Anyone, from anywhere in the world, can access it, research their family history, and contribute photographs, documents, and testimonies. It is a constantly growing space, fueled by the participation of the very communities it chronicles.
For each Municipality adhering to the Municipalities Project, the Foundation works on the construction of a section In the Virtual Museum: a gallery of stories, faces, names, dates, and migratory journeys that restores to the region the memory of those who left and, at the same time, offers descendants around the world a mirror in which to recognize themselves. The result is powerful on multiple levels. For residents of the municipality, seeing the stories of their ancestors highlighted is an act of pride and recognition. For descendants abroad, discovering that there is a digital space dedicated to their family history is often the spark that ignites the desire to journey back to their roots.
Alongside the Virtual Museum, the Foundation supports Municipalities in the construction of digital databases of emigrants: structured archives that collect, in an accessible and searchable format, information on emigrant citizens and their families. These databases are fed by multiple sources: registry records municipal, the parish archives (baptisms, marriages, deaths), the family testimonies collected directly, the documents stored abroad (arrival declarations, naturalization documents, passports) that diaspora families can share.
The work of building and organizing these archives has immediate practical value: many people who want to embark on a journey back to their roots don't know where to begin. They don't know their great-grandparent's exact country of origin, they don't know if there are any relatives left in Italy, they don't have access to local archives. A well-constructed and easily accessible database solves these problems, transforming a vague intention into a concrete path.
The Municipalities Project, through these tools, also becomes a service of support for genealogical research, a sector experiencing strong growth in the Anglo-Saxon and Latin American world, where more and more people are investing time and resources in researching their origins.
The collection of testimonies
One of the most valuable, and most urgent, activities of memory work is the collection of oral testimoniesFirst-generation emigrants, those who personally experienced departure and arrival in a foreign land, are now elderly. Every year, with their passing, an irreplaceable voice is lost. The Foundation supports municipalities in planning and implementing testimony collection projectsVideo interviews with the village's elders, audio recordings of family memories, and a collection of period photographs and their stories. These materials are then processed and incorporated into the Virtual Museum, where they become a shared heritage. These materials have a double life: cultural and communicative. They are documents of historical value, and at the same time, they are powerful content for the Foundation's social media channels and portals, capable of reaching and moving millions of people around the world.
Intangible heritage: dialects, traditions, knowledge
Memory is not just made of names and dates. It is also made of intangible heritage: the local dialects that the emigrants brought with them and which often survive in the diaspora communities with a purity that has now been lost in Italy; culinary traditions of a regional cuisine that has evolved elsewhere but which in the village of origin retains its original forms; artisanal knowledge linked to local practices; religious holidays and celebrations which communities abroad continue to celebrate, often in ways identical to those of a century ago.
The Municipalities Project helps Municipalities to map and enhance this heritage, making it visible both to residents themselves, who often do not fully perceive its value, and to diaspora communities, who recognize in these traditions the traces of a family history. Some of these traditions are already the object of attention by theUNESCO, which in recent years has expanded its work on intangible cultural heritage to include practices related to migration and diaspora.
Investing in memory isn't a nostalgic act. It's an identity-building strategy with concrete implications for the present and the future. Memory, in this sense, isn't the opposite of innovation. It's its very foundation.
