Museo della Resistenza in Fosdinovo

The Museo Audiovisivo della Resistenza of the Provinces of La Spezia and Massa Carrara is located in Fosdivovo, in the locality of Le Prade, and was founded in 2000 on the initiative of ANPI Sarzana in collaboration with the Municipality of Sarzana.

The idea was to renovate a historic building, called “La Colonia,” a building constructed in 1948, on the initiative of former partisans and thanks to the work of many volunteers, on land donated to the municipality by a private individual. The location could not have been more appropriate, since the area in which this building was built saw the unfolding of violent clashes between partisans, Germans and fascists, and was the scene of destruction and massacres of civilians. The Name The Colony is due to the fact that it immediately became a mountain summer camp that housed thousands of children from the immediate postwar period until the summer of 1971, from which time the building deteriorated due to poor maintenance, until, in 1994, the idea was born, strongly supported by the then president of ANPI Sarzana Paolino Ranieri, political commissar of the Garibaldi Brigade Ugo Muccini and former mayor of Sarzana, to make that place a museum that could be a monument for peace, as was La Colonia.

He began the recovery of the building, which to the support of many public bodies, associations and citizens, was completed in 1999 and opened on June 3, 2000.

The Museo Audiovisivo della Resistenza , is nestled in a forest of chestnut trees and as the name suggests, is not a classic museum, it has no exhibits or illustrative panels to show, but consists of eight large screens, corresponding to eight thematic sections, in which the visitor can activate deei videos of interviews with the protagonists of the years and events of the Resistance, not only partisans and partisans, but also simple witnesses of those events, and the feeling that one has is to feel humanly part of that History through the living voice of its protagonists. The videos are broken up into a few minutes of narration and composed as a collage, so the visitor is immersed in various points of view, and to move from one video to the next, one has to pass one’s hand over a large book placed on the table below the screen, so one gets the idea that what we are watching is really History, like the one one one reads about in the texts, but with the advantage of having a face and a voice.

Since March 2012, the Historical Museum of Resistance Association, which is in charge of the museum, has entrusted, through a public tender, the management of the museum to the Archives of Resistance Association, which organizes openings, guided tours also for groups or school groups, as well as various educational activities and paths of historical investigation and in-depth study on the themes of the Resistance.

The Association also runs the restaurant attached to the museum and organizes many cultural initiatives throughout the year: book presentations, performances, concerts.

In particular, in August, the Fino al Cuore della Rivolta, the Festival of the Resistance, is organized in the arena behind the museum and has involved artists of national caliber and thousands of people for twenty years.

The museum is dedicated to partisan commanders Alessandro Brucellaria battle name “Memo” and Flavio Bertone, battle name “Walter” and all those who fought for freedom.