Today, 27 January, Italy commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day, established in Italy by Law no. 211 of 2000 to honour the victims of the Holocaust and the persecutions of the Jewish people, as well as Italian military and political deportees to Nazi camps. The occasion is an opportunity for collective reflection, with ceremonies, initiatives, meetings, and shared storytelling and reflections involving schools in particular to preserve historical memory and prevent such events from happening again.

Among the initiatives for young people, the Ministry of Education and Merit, in collaboration with the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, has organised Scuola Futura - Journey of Memory 2026, a travelling workshop between Rome and Krakow with over one hundred participants. Other events include the Online Guided Tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau aimed at upper secondary schools and the I giovani ricordano la Shoah (Young People Remember the Shoah) competition.
In Tuscany, the Note di memoria (Notes of Memory) event (Florence) will take place on 28 January; in Rome, the Memoria genera Futuro (Memory Generates the Future) calendar was launched with more than forty events until 5 February; the Tavolo della Memoria (Memory Table) in Bologna has scheduled various initiatives aimed at students.

For schools, there are the Guidelines on Countering Anti-Semitism in Schools, the result of a technical-scientific committee between the Ministry of Education, the National Coordinator for the Fight against Anti-Semitism and the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, and the School and Memory portal of the Ministry of Education and Merit.

A curated selection of books from the Innocenti Library A.C. Moro is also available to help school-aged children engage with and understand the topic. The selection is available in the Bibliographies section.

Further materials and news can be found on this site under “Racial discrimination”, accessible from the “Topics” navigation menu.