The Museum was born from the desire to perpetuate and update the memories, knowledge and ideal legacy of the liberation struggle through a modern setting, enriched by the potential offered by new technologies and the most advanced exhibition strategies, but not insensitive to tradition and specificity of the physical space (the medieval fortress) and of the places (the free zone) in which the Museum is located. In continuity with the previous structure, inaugurated in 1979 and revised in 1996, the new exhibition is proposed as a privileged tool for raising awareness and historical training for emerging generations. The route obviously focuses on the extraordinary experience of the "Partisan Republic" of 1944, with its exceptional military, political and social implications. But the story of the Emilian Apennines becomes the angle of refraction from which to observe the deep history of Italian fascism, the great figures but also the failures of anti-fascism, the dynamics and repercussions of the participation of Mussolini's Italy in the war, the oscillations in the consent to the totalitarian regime.
 
Then the tormented events of 25 July and 8 September, the German invasion, the rebirth of fascism, in the new republican guise; but also the emotional, military and political response represented by resistance. It is reconstructed in its various dimensions, with particular attention to the context of the mountain; and in the various phases, from the difficult early winter of 1943, to the growth of the movement in the spring (also following the calls of the RSI), up to the partisan summer of 1944. In this context we find the specificity of the experience of the free zone established between the provinces of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
 
This story recalls an Italy split along numerous faults: the one that divides the liberated South from the occupied North; that which contrasts the fighters of the Social Republic and their partisan peers; that which distinguishes the paths of the great political and military history from the often painful and troubled experience of civil communities. The new Museum of the Republic of Montefiorino and of the Italian Resistance aims at understanding the reasons and concrete forms assumed by these fractures, and their meaning seventy years after the terrible and grandiose events of 1944-45. Already in the denomination, which combines the local and national dimensions, on the other hand it wants to reaffirm a principle widely known to scholars, and dear to all those who care about historical feeling as the foundation of associated life: that every particular story is also, always, general history; and that, conversely, every great story, to be understood, must know how to approach the men and women in flesh and blood who made it.