The “Museums inside and outside” project continues for the fourth consecutive year, born from the collaboration between the Welcome Florence Museums network and the Cpia 1 Florence school institute at the Sollicciano prison.
In recent days, in fact, thanks to the initiative, a meeting was held at the Galileo Museum in Florence in which the detained students of the Sollicciano school participated; the legal-pedagogical officials of the prison; the teachers and the principal of Cpia 1; the director of the Provincial School Office of Florence, as well as the Directorate of assets, institutions, cultural activities and sports of the Tuscany Region.
At the end of the morning, a convivial lunch was an opportunity to create connections between students, teachers and all museum workers. The day ended with a visit to the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory where an exhibition space was presented with the artefacts created during the workshops carried out by the female and male classes of Sollicciano.
The “Museums inside and outside” project includes a cycle of educational activities designed for prisoners with the aim of creating a synergy between the prison and the city of Florence, passing through the school and museums.
The objective of these activities is “to offer students a window onto the outside world by putting them in contact with art, science and culture through the experiences brought by educators from the seven Florentine museums”. The Welcome Florence Museum Network, which has obtained recognition from the Tuscany Region, is in fact made up of the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory, The Garden of Archimedes – A Museum for Mathematics, the Casa Buonarroti Museum, the Science and Technology Foundation Museum, the Galileo Museum , Horne Museum and University Museum System of the University of Florence.
Each museum, based on its own specificity, proposed activities that could give space to the manual skills and creative experimentation of the participants and that at the same time stimulate comparisons between different cultures. Within the Welcome Florence Museums network there are heterogeneous museums in terms of typology and affiliation, each meeting was therefore dedicated to examining in depth topics within the competence of the different museums such as science, art, language, archeology and anthropology.
The project was born in 2021 with a cycle of meetings held remotely, the result of the synergy between the educators of the Florence Sollicciano prison, the Cpia 1 Florence teachers and the representatives of the Welcome Florence Museums network. Since 2022, thanks to the commitment of Claudio Pedron, educational coordinator of Cpia 1 Florence, the meetings have taken place within the school.
This new edition saw a further step forward: the activities were extended to the women’s section of the Sollicciano prison, thus expanding the range of proposals and the number of participants involved. Furthermore, in December, a small group of prisoners, accompanied by teachers and educators, had the opportunity to visit the Galileo Museum. The visit was an important moment of exchange and sharing. The Welcome Florence Museums network aims, in fact, not only to spread knowledge of museum collections, but above all to contribute to identifying museums as places of welcome, participation and well-being.
“Museums inside and outside” is therefore proposed as a fruitful and intense collaborative experience. Florentine museums leave their premises to reach an audience usually excluded from the city’s cultural processes, thus creating new opportunities for participation.
