Small diary museum

What it is and where it is

We climb the 16 steps of the 16th-century Palazzo Pretorio (one of the few buildings in Pieve Santo Stefano left standing after World War II), and here we are in the Small Diary Museum, a place that moves us with its unexpected charge of humanity. The museum, inaugurated on December 7, 2013, is indeed "small," but it gives us a very rich selection of entries: thousands of entries (more than 8,000) enclosed in the diaries, memoirs, and epistolary letters carefully preserved in thediary archive founded in Pieve Santo Stefano by Saverio Tutino in 1984.

Why it is special

The first room is little more than a hallway. There is a background buzz: it is "the rustle of others": the voices of all the diaries kept in the Archives. On one wall, up to the ceiling: drawers and doors of every shape. Some have a label with a name. We open a drawer... and a voice rises: "Dear Diary...," "Dear Mom..." We see the pages of the notebooks, the letters, the writing sometimes clumsy and simple, sometimes learned and elegant, the photographs... Our guide, Mr. Luigi, affectionately tells us the stories of those people, as if they were his friends or relatives: a prisoner of war, a teenager in the 1980s, a pair of clandestine lovers in the 1800s...