A podcast to keep alive the memory of genocides committed throughout history, to understand the reasons for the “banality of evil”. A group of students from class 5I of the De Sanctis Deledda High School of Human Sciences (Martina Camplani, Martina Vacca, Martina Stefani, Benedetta Garau, Serena Sailis, Alessandro Spanu and Edoardo Fa), coordinated by teacher Franca Rita Porcu (teacher of Philosophy and Human Sciences), created an educational project, based precisely on the podcast tool, to reflect and reason on some tragedies of history. «The goal – explains Franca Rita Porcu – is to spread knowledge on the subject among the youngest, so that they are aware of their own prejudices and how these, if not made explicit and corrected, are at the basis of the processes of discrimination and dehumanization responsible for the extermination of peoples» .

The episodes

The podcast consists of seven episodes, each about ten minutes long, and is intended to be a flexible and easily accessible teaching material for the authors' peers. The first episode illustrates the definition of genocide and the process of dehumanization that makes it possible. Each of the other five episodes is dedicated to one of the five genocides studied: the Shoah, the genocide of the people, the genocide of the Roma and Sinti, or the Samudaripen, better known as Porrajamos, the extermination of the Tutsi and Native Americans. Finally, the seventh episode is a dialogue with Luca Bravi and Clarissa Beganovic. The historian, a researcher at the University of Florence, met with some classes of the De Sanctis Deledda Institute last November. During the meeting, the right to education of Roma and Sinti children in Italy was discussed. For a long time, they were forced to attend “special classes”, that is, classes reserved for them, separated from other children, where they spent a lot of time playing, because they were considered incapable of learning.

The meeting

The podcast is presented during the meeting with Santino Spinelli, Friday 7 February (11.20-13.15). The writer and musician will be a guest of De Sanctis Deledda to raise awareness of the tragedy of the Nazi-Fascist persecution of the Roma and Sinti. The initiative is organized by Issasco (Sardinian Institute for the History of Anti-Fascism and Contemporary Society), the associations ANPI (National Association of Italian Partisans) and FICC (Italian Federation of Cinema Clubs).