Black History Month Florence is our oldest research platform. Black History Month Florence was the first Black History Month initiative in Italy.

Curating, coordinating and promoting an extensive pluri-institutional program every February, BHMF is dedicated to the cultivation and proliferation of cross-institutional networks, collectivizing them in a single annual program dedicated to the celebration of Black histories within the global context. This year, in early 2025, we celebrated one decade of this work.

The work of Black History Month Florence provides a template for similar grassroots approaches to organizing around marginalized histories and methodologies for collective programming, integrating events into each hosting institution’s annual program, thus impacting their mission and vision while expanding the investment and impact of this work. Since the initial launch of the platform in 2016, we have developed, curated, orchestrated, and co-promoted over 500 events in nine editions through a network of over 100 partners.

Our work has been an incubator and template for other organisations, sparking Black History Month initiatives in the cities of Bologna in 2020, Torino in 2021, and Milan in 2023. BHMF is additionally working towards a cross-European network for team-building around Black History Month initiatives, including Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Belgium.