The primary school students participating to the educational programme "My puppet friends Fagiolino and Fagiolina". European citizenship, a friendship without borders through the figures of Ernesto Rossi and Ada Rossi" discover the value of friendship, solidarity and European citizenship through the stories of Ernesto Rossi and Ada Rossi, focusing on their confinement on the island of Ventotene, where the Ventotene Manifesto was conceived. Besides valorising the figure of Ernesto Rossi and his papers, the project allows the students to get to know one of his main passions: the puppets.
The project has several objectives:
- Conveying the history of the European Union, from the first phases of European integration to the values on which it is founded, through different expressive languages (musical, theatrical, visual-manual, bodily).
- Helping the students in placing themselves in European history, exploring their cultural backgrounds and personal and family memories, to obtain a greater awareness of their belonging to a broader collective history.
- Developing awareness of the importance of the common European cultural heritage.

The activities are carried out through multidimensional and multisensory methods. Music, theatre, visuality, manual and corporal activities, group work, verbal and non-verbal expression encourage the exploration of oneself and others Learning through these methods and creative languages implies a constant interweaving of fields of experience (body and motor skills, sound and listening, creativity and expression, contact and interaction), which makes the learning of certain concepts and passages of the history more accessible to the kindergarten and primary school students. Furthermore, we will make use of oral history, a historical research methodology based on the production and use of oral sources that opens new ways of working with children, through storytelling and memory, allowing the students to dialogue with the history of the European Union through their own personal stories. Finally, no less important is the work on the primary sources preserved in the Archives through the reading and analysis of different types of archive material (paper documents, posters, photographs, videos).
The preparatory activities carried out in class by the students before the visit were supported by the following didactical materials, provided by the HAEU Educational programme team:
- A song whose lyrics are the words of a nursery rhyme written by Ernesto Rossi during his prison period and which makes us reflect on the denied physical freedom and the sense of oppression of the Fascist regime.
- Four letters in which Ernesto Rossi tells the children about himself through various aspects of his life, so that they can learn more about his history and his thoughts on Europe.
- Guidelines for the building of a "Fagiolino" and "Fagiolina" puppet, as named by Ernesto, with simple materials such as foam rubber, buttons, coloured chalk, hot glue or, for a simplified version, a paper bag that can be decorated with colours:
- Description sheet for the narration of the story of a family object particularly significant for the students.

For the didactical activities proposed as part of this educational programme, the following historical sources preserved at the HAEU were used: ER-1, ER-3, ER-4, ER-13