Beyond borders: we are in Libertà
Multicultural Walks Between the Libertà District and Old Bari neighbourhood
The story of our most beautiful [emotional] journey ever: a [lifelong] self-training path with the students and volunteers of the Penny Wirton School of Bari — simply because in Bari, no one is a stranger.
The “Squola Penny Wirton” (yes — with a “q”! Because we’ve learned that sometimes you start from mistakes) is one of the many projects developed by the association Gruppo Educhiamoci alla Pace – GEP. This local initiative offers free Italian lessons to migrants, and began in December 2016, right in Bari’s multiethnic Libertà district, born from the desire of a group of volunteers — not just teachers — who wanted to actively promote social inclusion.
We wanted to meet them — and when we did, we found shared intentions, aligned methods, and a common purpose.
“A school with no classes, no registers, no grades. Some of our students are illiterate even in their mother tongue; they may never have held a pen before, and after a year of lessons, they can barely write their first and last name.”
These are just a few of the moving moments the Penny Wirton School of Bari has given us. They are a part of what we love doing — and why we do it. With the support and inspiration of Sguardi Diversi, a similar initiative by Free Walking Tour Modena, we began in December 2018 with a solidarity-based free tour, tracing the relationship between present and past, between here and elsewhere, between who we are and who we were.
In February 2019, a second tour followed. From the very start, our goal was to tell the story of the city through the eyes of those who live in it — people who inhabit it and who, even if just for a moment, can call it home. The journalist Silvia Dipinto captured this story in the pages of La Repubblica Bari.
As spring arrived, we began a fruitful training process through meetings, exchanges, and relationships — an informal educational path where we shared skills and storytelling methods, absorbed ideas, and experimented with different ways of narrating the city we live in and move through. We discovered shared values and visions: the gift economy, the accessibility of knowledge, and our collective practices of mutual aid and empowerment.
#weareinlibertà is not a random name — it’s a way to open ourselves to different perspectives, to share a new idea of what it means to be a tour guide. It’s a way to walk down paths often excluded from tourist maps, but that have just as much to say — even to those who live in the city every day. We seek exchange, shared storytelling, and the community of the margins, beyond all borders.
Official website: Free Walking Tour Bari
