Centro ItalianoItalian Storytelling Centre · since 2018
We explore, share and experiment with applied storytelling for businesses, communities, schools and places. From a small village in the Apennines, in dialogue with storytellers from all over the world.
Every story
is a thread
We gather it from those who live it: a person, a business, a place, a community
We weave
it together
With applied storytelling, threads become a weave: a story that can hold people together
Until it becomes
everyone’s story
Chapter I About us
Once upon a time there was an open group, brought together by the joy of learning and experimenting. We believe in a world where everyone can make the tools of storytelling their own, to grow as people, as professionals and as communities.
The Italian Storytelling Centre is a research group that explores, shares and experiments with the potential of applied storytelling.
We were set up in 2018 in association with the Scottish Storytelling Centre, the first European centre dedicated entirely to storytelling, and we draw on the teachings of the School of Storytelling at Emerson College, the longest-running school of storytelling in Europe. Since 2022 we have been an official member of FEST, the Federation for European Storytelling.
We are a non-profit association: an incubator where founding members and new friends build projects with associations and businesses that want to develop activities and services based on storytelling.
Great stories happen to those who can tell them
Ira Glass
Chapter II What we do
In our workshops a story reveals itself like a puzzle, piece by piece, until the whole picture appears. The path has stages that repeat, but each time it is shaped around the people who walk it.
Every journey starts with people. We help each person find their own voice and the story they want to tell: individual or shared, but always with a purpose.
With mind maps and story maps we bring forgotten events, memories and details to the surface: what makes a person, a business or a place unique.
The storyboard turns fragments into structure. Warp and weft: the teller’s voice, the story of the place, and the universal archetype that makes it everyone’s story.
Performance is not the goal: it is the moment when the journey made together becomes a gift. From there, the story starts to pass from mouth to mouth.
Chapter III Portfolio
We apply storytelling where stories matter most: to rediscover the purpose of a business, the bond of a community, the meeting of people far apart.
Company stories
Through practical exercises, managers and staff step into the mythical dimension of their company’s story: the hero’s journey, to rediscover the real reason the business exists and the values to carry into the future.
Project Economia narrativa? · Casa Bufalini, Cesena
Business projects
Stories of places
We help communities rediscover the stories that unite them and the places where those stories live, weaving together the teller’s voice, the story of the land and the universal archetype.
Project Prodotto tipico? Storytelling! · Bocconi (FC)
Community projects
Stories that bring people closer
A saying goes that you will never kill someone whose story you know. We use storytelling to ease tensions around diversity and marginality, and to find the story that unites us.
Project Sconfinamenti · Emilia-Romagna Region
Social projects
Stories that help children grow
Fairy tales, nursery rhymes and legends foster empathy and identification, and strengthen identity and self-esteem. Learning by telling builds language, emotional skills and the ability to relate to others.
Project Le storie come gemme di memoria · R.Y.L.A. Jr.
School projects
Stories for living in a place anew
The environmental crisis is also a matter of communication. New stories about sustainability open hopeful visions and responsible futures, starting from the landscape we live in.
Project Storytelling e gentilezza · Portico di Romagna
Environmental projectsChapter IV Coming up
Coming up
A two-part festival exploring applied storytelling through three dimensions: cultural driver, intergenerational collaboration and slow tourism. Its aim is to show how narrative thinking contributes to new ways of living together and to the social capital of communities. The first part, online, is open to everyone through our virtual doors.
Coming up
Stories in the cracks of the asphalt, along the roadside, in urban spaces. The plant sprouting from the asphalt is a fragment of the untamed: the programme for the quarter.
The programme
Coming up
An exhibition curated by Intreccio Creativo, opened by “The Girl on the Balcony”: a mashup of the accounts of people who lived through the 1966 Florence flood.
Find out moreChapter V The archive
We collect the stories built and heard during our activities. We make them our own, transform them and let them go, so that others can tell them in their turn.
A story from the archive
Not so long ago, not far from here, there lived a farmer called Aristide with his wife, Malvina. They had five children. When the sixth arrived, having run out of ideas, they named him “Basta”, which means “Enough”: and it is thanks to that very name that the story will find, if not the treasure, at least its happy ending.
Chapter VI The voices
A group with varied experience and ambitions, brought together by the joy of learning and experimenting together.
Creative director
“I use storytelling to create connections and build bridges.” She has taken part in festivals across Europe, North America and Asia, and teaches at the School of Storytelling, Emerson College.
President
“I discovered storytelling by chance, listening to a story in a language I did not understand. I felt the vibrations of the story. It was love at first sight.”
Vice president
“Storytelling fascinated me as a method when I saw entrepreneurs moved as they reconstructed the story of their own business.”
Storyteller and trainer
Explorer of the imaginary, sociologist, curator of the Metamuseo Girovago and member of FEAST, the Federation of Asian Storytellers.
Secretary and trainer
“In everyday life I am a translator and write other people’s stories. Here I enjoy telling them and listening to them.”
Relations with schools and associations
“Stories are part of our most ancient nature: they help loosen our inner knots.”
Epilogue Our home
Our centre is in the small medieval village of Portico di Romagna, in the Apennines between Florence and Bologna, where fate brought us together for the first time. We meet here several times a year and welcome storyteller friends from all over the world for a true Italian community experience.
Member of FEST