The International Feast of the History. A Concrete Project for the Dissemination of History and Heritage

Abstract

In this paper, I present a series of educational projects, new challenges and perspectives that the International Centre of methodology for teaching history and heritage (DiPaSt) of the University of Bologna has undertaken in the last years regarding the teaching of history and heritage education. I would like to start by asking a question: can historical and cultural heritage act as a tool to compensate for the gaps, shortcomings, and the sense of loss, which afflict and define the society in which we live? In addition, this in turn leads us to another question: which tools and which methodologies can we use? Every time when a professor starts a new course of Medieval History or Methodologies of teaching history, most of the students tell him that they do not like history. Therefore, the professor usually spends half of the time of the course explaining why it is important to study and to teach history. Because history is not the merely textbook, or a sequence of dates, wars, battles. Nevertheless, history is us, we are history. For these reasons, fifteen years ago, a group of professors of the University of Bologna got together and created the “Feast of the history”. Nowadays, the Feast is widely recognized as one of the most important events in Europe.