After several online meetings due to the pandemic restrictions, our partnership eventually managed to meet in person for the final transnational meeting in Turin.
Originally scheduled in May 2021 in correspondence of the Turin International Bookfair, then postponed due to the pandemic, our final transnational meeting was still pending due to the constant uncertainty about the opportunity of arranging mobilities with the Coronavirus still present across Europe.
After several discussions within our partnership and considering the evolution of the pandemic in the various countries involved, we agreed to stick to the original plan to organize the meeting in Italy, but during the summer.
The project partners thus met at Polo del ‘900 – an innovative cultural hub in Turin gathering 26 organizations dealing with historical, social, economic and cultural research on the twentieth century and the preservation of the values of resistance, democracy, freedom and memory – on 15 July 2021, hosted by Associazione Culturale Twitteratura. The meeting was attended by 21 people from the 7 partner organizations.
The main aims of the transnational meeting were to assess the project progress and results and to fine-tune next steps. Discussions also included new ways to replicate and scale the project and possible new partnerships, along with the assessment of the skills acquired so far. Particular attention was paid to the final evaluation process, including documentation needed for the final report and still pending budgetary issues.
The Italian partners also shared their experience in innovative ways of promoting cultural heritage, presenting a case study on how they combined technology and civic participation when they were invited to join the team working on the candidacy of Siena as 2019 European Capital of Culture.
On the same occasion, a dissemination event was also organized at Polo del ‘900 to showcase the project outputs. Each organization brought the brochures with augmented posters that were displayed to the public.
The meeting in Turin also offered partners the occasion to visit the city through a guided tour focused on its mysterious side, among legends, symbols and oddities. The tour started from the church of San Lorenzo, a baroque masterpiece full of symbolic and Masonic references, then moved to the Dome, with the mystery of the Holy Shroud, and to via Accademia delle Scienze to discover the Egyptian origins of the city. In Piazza San Carlo it revealed the vices and virtues of the first Royal Madame, with a good luck ritual at Caffè Torino, a stop by the Devil’s Gate and at the peculiar fountain in Solferino Square
