Why a Museum of Saving?
In our everyday life, more and more influenced by decisions linked to finance, credit and social security, most people are encountering increasing difficulties in managing their own money, not only, and not always, because of lack of resources but above all because of shortage of basic financial skills.
The Museum of Saving was born from the idea of creating a unique, innovative, entertaining location, dedicated to families, adults and children, where it is possible to approach the concepts of saving and investment with a clear and simple language, in order to improve our own FINANCIAL LITERACY.
In fact, it is possible to make sound financial decisions without being able to use complex mathematical formulas!
Mission
The Museum’s mission is to contribute to spreading FINANCIAL EDUCATION to help people make rational and informed decisions and act in ways to achieve the priorities of their lives.
But what is FINANCIAL EDUCATION?
It is the process through which individuals learn to manage money carefully and increase their familiarity with products, institutions and concepts of risk/return, in addition to the capability of calculating.
The aim is to enable people to manage their income by planning expenses and goals over the medium- long term.
The Museum addresses a diversified audience – adults, teenagers and children – and aims to stimulate the active participation of its visitors.
For this reason, we embraced the EDUTAINMENT (education and entertainment) approach, oriented to facilitate learning through play. As McLuhan states, “It’s misleading to suppose there’s any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter “.
The setting
The Museum of Saving IS NOT A TRADITIONAL MUSEUM but a unique EDUTAINMENT project. Technology and interactivity are used to surprise visitors.
The visit starts with an introduction to the main events of economic history (history and the role of money, trade, birth of fiduciary loans, the first bank activities, speculative bubbles, the introduction of the Euro, major financial crises, etc.) and continues with an overview of the main characteristics of most common financial instruments (shares, bonds, derivatives, insurance, investment funds, pension funds).
Differently themed tours use dedicated audio-visual and interactive material (docu-fictions, cartoons, interviews, role plays, video games and interactive labs) to satisfy curiosity and widening needs of visitors.
The Museum is enriched by the mixing of economy, literature and cinema. Through technology the visitor meets, in a new dimension, famous authors (Dante, Molière, Shakespeare and Hemingway) and well-known film directors, who tell how they dealt with money.
The last room of the Museum is a wonderful example of GAMIFICATION (the use of games to convey extraneus content for educational purposes)!
Through videogames and apps, it is possible to test management skills, by evaluating, by winning points, money management capabilities.
The Museum’s two mascots, the ants For & Mica, accompany the children along the themed tours with amusing cartoons; we believe that financial education should be part of that investment in HUMAN CAPITAL necessary to the growth of new generations.