Posted on 04 March 2020
The ESTO project - ESTO being the abbreviation Ernesto Rossi used to sign his letters to relatives - and its web platform estoeducational.eu was launched to stimulate debate and awareness on European history and on the origins of the project for a United Europe. The leading question of the project was how to convey to young people the importance of the values of freedom, democracy, tolerance, which are an integral part of the European unification process?
Taking as starting point the figure of Ernesto Rossi and his contribution to the Ventotene Manifesto, the ESTO educational project aims to spread the importance of history, the origins of a united Europe, and the values of freedom, democracy and tolerance, by stimulating students through creative ways of learning. The cinematographic medium, and in particular the documentary genre, has in this context enormous potential for social impact, especially in the involvement of the new generations. A first step of the project is therefore to offer teachers and schools the free possibility to show the documentary film ‘The words of Ventotene. Ernesto Rossi and the project for a United Europe’ in classrooms.
Directed by Marco Cavallarin, Marco Mensa and Elisa Mereghetti, the documentary film highlights Ernesto Rossi's fundamental contribution to the elaboration of the project for a United Europe project contained in the Ventotene Manifesto, drawn up together with Altiero Spinelli and others in 1941. The documentary having already reached out to over 2.000 students to date, various educational projects, study groups and laboratories have emerged from the projections, and the film directors aim at reaching also European schools.
The private papers of Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli have been deposited at the Historical Archives of the European Union in Florence. The Archives, therefore, supports the ESTO project and spreads the message of Ventotene for a United Europe in its educational activities for schools, which bring about 1.000 students of primary and secondary levels every year to the seat of the Archives at Villa Salviati in Florence to learn about the written memory on the European integration process preserved therein.
Find out more about ESTO here.