Autobiografie d’infanzia. I “volti” in penombra custoditi dal Museo dell’Istituto degli Innocenti di Firenze

The history of the “spedale degli Innocenti” is famous throughout the world. It was the first orphanage founded in Europe in 1419 and its rooms contain the objects and stories of hundreds and hundreds of children cared for over the centuries. They are intimate stories of which all traces have been lost and of which very little information remains. However, these are useful for better understanding the reception process designed to support these very young people without a family. The birth of the feeling of childhood, the transformations of the family, the social and cultural reorganization of modern society are exemplified in the finds, works, and documents owned by the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence and tell the “faceless” stories of distant childhoods. The personal objects collected by the new museum organization represent the short “childhood autobiographies” sedimented over time; they are atypical biographies, but essential because they are contributions of microhistory that connect new historiographical trends to pedagogical research. Using the works of Leon Battista Alberti dedicated to family education, rereading Freud and the story of little Hans, to finally arrive at the poignant Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhunder by Benjamin, this article dedicates the last part to autobiography beyond the literary sense, or an alternative approach to the distant world of childhood, in an attempt to give a new meaning to all those objects preserved in the oldest and most important bephrotrophy in Europe.