The Origins of the Postgraduate Programs on Cultural Heritage Knowledge, Management, Conservation, and Communication in Italy: A Vision of the Past as Engine for the Next Future

A discriminating, multi-disciplinary knowledge is a necessary expertise that all the actors who operate in the management, conservation, and communication of Cultural Heritage (CH) must have. They are, therefore, expected to be seriously prepared in many fields. However, a proper training program for them, which effectively combines humanistic studies with scientific ones, is difficult to be arranged when there is lack of comprehensive perspective in the education system. This paper introduces the experiences of the postgraduate programs that were established for many years at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Through a calibrated mixture of theoretical background and practical applications taught by high-profile scholars, those programs proved to be effective in the preparation of figures later dealing with the CH at different levels. The clear organization of those specialized lectures, the innovation introduced with hands-on practical case studies and the adoption of state-of-the-art techniques, led to an educational paradigm that is still efficient, whose outcomes also demonstrated how it can be inspiring for future high-level learning programs, which must be oriented towards fostering an aware preparation for leading operators involved in the conservation and dissemination of CH.