Preserving the heritage for future generations. The Italian American Museum Network in the United States

The contribution focuses on the genesis and analysis of the network that groups together the Italian American Museums (IAM) present throughout the United States, which have enhanced the historical, cultural, material, and immaterial heritage of the Italian American communities since their appearance at the end of the 19th century. The educational function of the museum stands as an important and valid resource to promote knowledge, skills, and behaviors generating conscious enjoyment and active citizenship as well as they represent public history capsules related to the heritage of cultural minorities. The educational function contributes to defining the cultural project of the institution, together with the activities of acquisition, study, communication and exhibition activities for which IAM is a cultural hub, “a non-profit institution, at the service of society and its development, open to the public, which researches the material and immaterial evidence of man and his environment, acquires, conserves, communicates and above all exhibits them for the purposes of study, education and enjoyment” (ICOM Statutes, art. 2.1). The historical, educational, political, and cultural value of the IAM is to illuminate the history of Italian emigration abroad and to highlight the most neglected aspects of their social and political inclusion, not finding space in the official canons; at the same time, it promotes the knowledge and the methodologies of historical research through a multidisciplinary dialogue by involving the community through the digital world. The paper consists of a descriptive part of the buildings, rooms and activities offered, plus a sampling of interviews conducted with the current directors of the most important IAMs in order to understand the vision and organization of maintaining and preserving the memory of Italian emigration and, at the same time, of disseminating the cultural heritage through anthropological and linguistic-literary aspects considering internal changea – the liquid and flexible identity of the new Italian Americans – and external changes, such as the cancel culture movement.The purpose of the current research is, therefore, to assess the depth of dissemination to museum users in order to elevate the symbolic representation of the imaginary of Italian Americans and Italian-American, American, and Italian cultural relations.