About me

I live and work between Germany and Italy. I have been deeply absorbed in the "frame of play" for almost twenty years. I have two guiding lights and inspirational teachers, Roberto Papetti, artist toymaker, and Gianfranco Zavalloni, teacher and environmentalist. They both taught me the richness of play, teaching children to make toys with their own hands, as well as making them play with adults, while rediscovering and handing down the gestures of traditional play.

In 2012, I developed my own original Playbus project, which I called INTERCULTURAL PLAYBUS, for the Volkshochschule in Tübingen, set up with games from various regions of the world. The project was nominated as a Best Practice by the Baden-Wurttemberg Ministry of Culture, winning the Integration Prize of the City of Tübingen.

Since 2013, I have been collaborating with the Associazione Giochi Antichi di Verona for the “Tocatí – International Street games Festival”. And since 2019, I am responsible for the development of the Education and Training in the framework of “Tocatí – A Shared Programme for the safeguarding of Traditional Sports and Games”, which is candidate to the UNESCO Register of Good Safeguarding Practices.

I ideate and develop play research projects, play didactics workshops, as well as teacher-training and educator training. The area of research underpinning my work is the so-called Play Studies: it involves interdisciplinary research involving several disciplines: archaeology, history, cultural anthropology, sociology, pedagogy.

Since July 2021, I am a Junior Research at the Faculty of Education of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

Follow me on Academia: academia/FrancescaBerti