The fully restored Rocca Fregoso soars on the top of the village of Sant’Agata Feltria and is the seat of the museum “Rocca delle Fiabe” (“Castle of Fairy Tales”), which was devised by Professor Antonio Faeti (Former Full Professor of Children’s Literature at the University of Bologna). The museum represents an unprecedented and unique achievement on the national scene, since it assigns fairy tales – and Children’s Literature along with them – their own place, whose high value is both real and symbolic. In fact, it offers itself as a “bulwark”, an academy in which fairy tales can be studied, defended, preserved, interpreted. The Castle of Fairy Tales, intended to accommodate four rooms to be considered as metaphorical places with a theme-based background, continues on the paths of – and transversal to – fairy tales with the complicity of events, visitors, training sessions, narrative performances, which contribute to show the way to build up an intensive relationship between fairy tale’s constants and its hyperbolic variations, ramifications and appearings into the genres and languages that create the complexity of imagery.
The reappropriation of fairy tales by young and adult “travellers” is a utopia and at the same time a fundamental process to approach the cultural depth of a literary-narrative-visual field necessary to meet the need for stories and fairy tales which permeates childhood and should be recognized in youthhood and adulthood. In this direction, the “Rocca delle Fiabe” acts as ideal setting to follow the paths which advance in the multiple metaphorical dimensions of fairy tales, and gives shape, in scientific terms, to research topics that are essential for the study of Children’s Literature, by means of a variety of interpretative keys always including pedagogical and educational perspectives.
It is especially important to highlight the uniqueness of the setting in Sant’Agata Feltria, formed by the complex Rocca delle Fiabe, Convent of St. Gerolamo, Mariani Theatre. This context gives life to a “monument” for fairy tales and consequently creates the perfect atmosphere for precious occasions for reflection on the cultural value of Novalis’ motto «everything is fairy tale» and on its rootedness in the imagery, which can be found all the more in the local dimension. The experience of immersion into texts, images, meanings and interpretative adventures that the context offers can thus be experienced as “from the inside” of the metaphorical landscape of fairy tales.
The realisation of “Rocca delle fiabe” is due to the Municipality and the Association Pro Loco of Sant’Agata Feltria, in partnership with the Province of Rimini and the Region Emilia Romagna.
The four rooms: