Discover what a school classroom looked like a century ago!
The collection of school furniture preserved by the Museum is arranged to reproduce the typical style of Italian classrooms, which remained substantially unchanged during the long period from 1861 to the early 1960s.
Among the original materials on display are desks from the 1940s, a teacher’s desk, a blackboard, cabinets, leather satchels from various decades of the twentieth century, and benches from elementary and nursery schools, mostly from the Veneto region. On the walls, you can see school wall paintings, while in the cabinets, teaching aids for various subjects, pens, nibs, and inks are stored.
According to the Regulations for Elementary Schools of September 15, 1860, every school should have necessarily been equipped with:
- Study desks with enough seats for all students;
- A table with a locked drawer and a chair for the teacher;
- A locked cabinet for storing books, writings, etc.;
- A stove to heat the room;
- An inkwell for the teacher and fixed inkwells in the desks for the students;
- A picture representing the basic units and actual measurements of the metric decimal system;
- A crucifix;
- A portrait of the King.
Two unique pieces that capture attention are the large nineteenth-century fraction board from a school in the province of Rovigo and the rural alphabet from the 1940s.