School of Yesteryear

Our life-sized reproduction of an old-fashioned Italian schoolroom evokes the environment and atmosphere of schooldays of yore with a range of authentic furnishings and teaching materials. Young visitors can try their hand at writing using fountain pen loaded with squid ink, leaf through old textbooks, and real children’s exercise books of yesteryear (full of scribbles and doodles) and also read items from a collection of over a hundred copies of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi and Pinocchiate (Pinocchio-inspired stories by other authors) including an 1881 first edition copy of Giornale per i bambini (The Children’s Weekly – in which Pinocchio was first published in serial form).

You can weigh an old schoolbag in your hands and imagine the smell of a packed-lunch wafting from the lunchbox within providing an apposite link to our exhibition on the story of food in a series of six thematic display cases recounting the major changes in our diets via toy and game exhibits alluding to: prehistoric humans and hunting, domesticated animals, the marketplace, the first human settlements, the evolution of shops and le cucine delle nonne (grandmas’ cooking).