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The role and impact of thearchivi della scrittura popolareAnna Iusoa

a Università degli studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’Published online: 12 May 2014.

To cite this article: Anna Iuso (2014) The role and impact of the archivi dellascrittura popolare, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 19:3, 241-251, DOI:10.1080/1354571X.2014.897436

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The role and impact of the archivi della scritturapopolare

Anna Iuso

Universita degli studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, archives for the collection and storage of non-professional writings, mostly life-histories by working-class authors, were establishedin Europe. I indicate their roles in different national contexts and the political andsocial ambitions of their founders. In Italy the collection by individualanthropologists, historians and political militants of autobiographical texts, oral andwritten, was expanded in the 1980s by the creation of a network of archivi della scritturapopolare, dedicated to gathering life-writings in their many forms. The mostimportant was the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale at Pieve Santo Stefano, whereVincenzo Rabito’s typescript is stored. I analyse the aims and achievements of itsfounder, Saverio Tutino, and the evolution of its influential place in Italy’s culturalheritage.

Keywords

Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, Saverio Tutino, archives for scritture popolari, Italiananthropology, cultural heritage, memory.

Archives for autobiographies in Europe

Terra matta’s success can be said to have a long history. In some ways it recalls the

case of Jacob Wojciechowski, a worker whose autobiography became a literary

success in the 1930s and contributed, in part, to the fortunes of the life-history

method in Polish sociology. It represented the discovery of a talented ‘ordinary

writer’, exemplifying an insight into the lives of men and women excluded from

the main currents of history but taken to be the real depositaries of Polish

national spirit and identity (Grabski 1982; Markiewicz-Lagneau 1982). In the

1930s, however, the history of the archives for autobiographies had barely

begun.1 Briefly rehearsing it will enable us to understand how its development

has provided the cultural, political and institutional framework for Terra matta’s

success.

Elsewhere I have divided the history of such archives in Europe since the

beginning of the twentieth century into three phases, devoted in turn to the

political history of the nation-state, civic commitment, and ego-documents

(Iuso 2000). In the first category we can put the Polish archives, created in the

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2014

Vol. 19, No. 3, 241–251, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2014.897436

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1920s and 1930s and the earliest examples dedicated to autobiographies. They

had their forerunners in Finnish archives established in the early years of the

century, encompassing oral and written documents as well as non-

autobiographical materials concerning the lives of ‘ordinary people’. The case

of Finland, which became an independent nation-state in 1918, provides a

particularly good illustration of the links between the politico-institutional

context, the gathering of examples of popular culture as a way of retrieving the

national culture which they embodied, and the assembling of life-histories

which provided exemplary personifications of that same culture. In the Polish

case, the collaboration of Thomas and Znaniecki, best represented by their

famous The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Thomas and Znaniecki 1918–

20) with its methodological introduction and great influence on American

sociology, inspired subsequent work in Poland, making it the most rewarding

example in Europe for the systematic application of the method of life-history.

Between 1921, when Znaniecki launched his first call for examples of life-

history, and the 1980s a total of roughly half a million examples were collected, a

selection of which were published in the journal Pamietnikarstwo Polskie (Society

of Friends of Memoirs 1982). The close connection between the archives and

politics was confirmed by the events of the 1980s and the fate of the archive itself

after the triumph of Solidarnosc. Identified with the preceding Communist

regime under which it had operated, it was first starved of funds, then largely

replaced by the more recent Karta and the Archive of the Polish Republic and,

finally, largely dismantled. Despite the loss for Polish and European history and

social sciences, its thousands of autobiographies nonetheless provide

opportunities to analyse the history of the archives for the connections between

research methodologies, cultural changes and political regimes.

In the transition to the second generation of the archives for autobiography, a

particularly important experiment deserves to be noted. In 1937 the Mass

Observation Archive was established in England by an anthropologist, Tom

Harrison, the poet (later professor of sociology) Charles Madge and the film-

maker Humphrey Jennings who wanted to create an ‘anthropology of

ourselves’, a portrait of the everyday lives of ordinary people (Calder 1985).2 Its

investigative technique was a kind of ‘participant observation’ at a distance, since

it relied on a 2,000-strong team of observers and diarists who sent in reports and

completed questionnaires on local perceptions and discussions of specific events.

Where the initiative foreshadowed the archives of the second generation was in

its determination to unearth the views of ordinary, especially marginalized,

groups whose voices would collectively make up a ‘history from below’ in

contrast to official histories. Thus the second generation of archives, created

mainly in Germany, Austria and Italy between the 1960s and 1980s, tended to

focus on specific groups – soldiers, migrants, women and children, political and

trade union activists – in the effort to record the lives of those who might

otherwise have disappeared from history. The archives were generally small-

scale, collected written and oral texts and were designed to conjugate social

Anna Iuso

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knowledge and political commitment. Their organizers were often academics

and intellectuals who had come from the same social background being studied;

and their intellectual production in the form of books, films and exhibitions was

intended as part of the wider project of recovering and re-establishing collective

identities that had been lost or remained hidden.

In Italy, the best example of this effort to produce active social knowledge was

undoubtedly the Archivio della Scrittura Popolare, established in 1987 at the

Museo Storico in Trento. Despite its relatively modest dotation of ca. 650

documents and a specific focus on texts produced during the First World War,

the Trento archive took on a major intellectual and organizational role in the

systematic reflection in Italy on the nature of popular writing. For two decades

national seminars were held there on themes such as the nature and location of

popular autobiographies, writing by women and children, letters written to

celebrities.3 In the same year the archive took on the role of coordinating the

newly created Federation of the Archives of Popular Writing (Federazione degli

Archivi di Scrittura Popolare; FASP) which brought together a great variety of

similarly inspired but more loosely organized and poorly resourced research and

cultural centres based in universities and local communities.4 Until the

Federation faded away in the mid-1990s, its activities consisted largely of

initiatives organized by the archive in Trento. Finally, Trento provided the

occasion for the first international meeting of directors of archives of popular

writing in seven European countries (Antonelli and Iuso 2000).

Parallel tradition

Before we reach the third generation of the archives of scrittura popolare, where

Terra matta is located, we need to remember that at least since 1945 the social

sciences in Italy have been concerned with the collection of life-histories,

mostly in oral form (Clemente 2013). Their practitioners created a research

tradition parallel to the work of the archives, with the two traditions coming

together – as the membership of the FASP indicated – in the involvement of

academic historians and social scientists in the initiatives organized by the

archives in the late twentieth century. The longstanding interest in popular

culture (tradizioni popolari), attributing importance to the everyday lives and

ideas of ordinary folk, was shared by intellectuals on the boundary between

anthropology and literature. Among them stand out the peasant-poet Rocco

Scotellaro (1954, 1956), the sociologist and writer Danilo Montaldi (1960,

1961, 1970), the sociologist, poet and non-violent activist Danilo Dolci (1956)

and the anthropological writer Franco Cagnetta (1975), who were among the

first to demonstrate the value that oral autobiographies could bring to

ethnographic research. The voices that those authors included in books fusing

anthropology and literature had already come to be seen as a legitimate part of

academic enquiry, notably in the work of Ernesto de Martino, whose first

fieldwork in Lucania between 1949 and 1952 included the collection and

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transcription of autobiographies by rural workers (Gallini 1986, 105). His

encouragement to collect oral life-histories was followed up by historians (e.g.

Bosio 1975; Passerini 1984; Portelli 1985), sociologists (e.g. Ferrarrotti 1981,

1986) and anthropologists (e.g. Gallini 1981).5 As far as the collection of written

texts is concerned, the publication of the exchange of letters between a

researcher, Annabella Rossi, and Michela Margiotta, one of her semi-literate

subjects in a study of tarantism originally inspired by de Martino, was especially

significant (Rossi 1970).6 Most of the texts gathered, in part produced, by these

traditions of research were not stored in public archives but remained in

university or private hands. An exception was the case of a life-history collected

by the anthropologist Annamaria Rivera (Rivera 1984) whose first volume was

stored in the Trento archive and published at a time when both academic and

public attitudes towards the topic of memory had begun to change.

Right to memory: autobiography as heritage

The emergence in France and Italy of a third generation of archives for

autobiographies occurred in the 1980s and 1990s at a time when Europe was

discovering the pleasure and the duty of memory, a taste for the past and a

repositioning in relation to its history. In spite, or because, of the rapid passage of

this ‘short century’, it could not finish without shocks to memory. The last two

decades have seen the reopening of some of the century’s major wounds, in

particular the Shoah, raising issues of the nature of witnessing and the

‘legitimacy of memory’ (Agamben 1998; Wieviorka 1998), generating major

analyses of the relation between human beings and their pasts (Hartog 2003) and

between memory and its necessary correlate, oblivion (Todorov 1995; Ricoeur

2000). Along with the impulse to recover collective memory which the debates

on the Shoah exemplify, the West has been grasped by a kind of ‘mania for

autobiography’, the counterpart on the individual level of the retrieval and

revaluation of the events of major public importance. This passion is confirmed

by the publishing industry’s enthusiasm for anything that smacks of

autobiography, memoir and diary and by the coeval but clearly not coincidental

establishment of archives for autobiographies across Europe, representing the

leading edge of the ego-documentary wave of the late twentieth century. The

archives have rejected any limitation by theme to the documents they accept:

everything is acceptable. Attention has turned away from the content of lives of

authors and their relation to a social or historical context towards authors

themselves, their relation to the practice of writing and to the telling of their

life-stories. In these archives an autobiographical text is no longer considered

simply a resource to mine for data but rather a kind of monument, a unique

deliberate commemoration of an individual’s story. Authors are no longer

informants but subjects, for the most part at least present if not active. So the

document-archive becomes the monument-archive, taking at least two forms.

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The first was invented by Philippe Lejeune, a literary scholar who had shifted

his attention from literature proper to the autobiographies of ordinary folk.7

Towards the end of the 1980s, he invited his radio audience to send him

autobiographical texts – an open-ended invitational practice he has maintained –

which became the basis of the Association pour l’autobiographie et le Patrimoine

Autobiographique (APA), established in 1992 at Amberieu-en-Bugey, but with

reading groups in Paris and Lyon and annual meetings of the membership. The

distinctive feature of this association, leadingme to describe it as an ego-archive, is

that it is built around the direct relation between writer and text. The writers

themselves meet annually to discuss their lives, memories and writing practices;

texts from the archive are read and analysed in the annual meetings and

commented on in the association’s journal La faute a Rousseau. Lejeune’s creation

was inspired by, but deliberately distinguished from, the second model of a

monument-archive, the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (ADN) at Pieve Santo

Stefano, where the original typescript of Terra matta arrived in 1999.

Saverio Tutino and the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale at Pieve

Like the APA, the ADN was created by a single determined figure, in this case

a journalist, Saverio Tutino, rather than an academic.8 Tutino had had a

remarkable career as a foreign correspondent for several leftwing newspapers,

was famous for his interviews of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung,

and therefore needed no introduction when he arrived at Pieve in 1984 with the

vague idea of establishing a literary festival. The notion rapidly took shape in the

form of a competition open to all for the best autobiographical text with a cash

prize (2 million lire at the time) and a guarantee of publication.

When he established the archive, Tutino was largely unaware of the existing

examples of the genre and their collection practices and was therefore convinced

that he was creating something new and unique (Iuso 2001). It did indeed differ

from the Polish precedent mentioned above insofar as the autobiographies to be

collected were not restricted to texts produced by members of a single social

category, nor were they destined to be analysed. The interest in soliciting them

was simply ethical and social: to build up an Italian memory bank that might later

be useful to historians and anthropologists, but which was first of all intended to

preserve the individual voices of ordinary folk that Tutino considered had for too

long been unheard. Tutino’s own life provided the impetus for this task.

Communist from an early age, he had become a journalist in order to provide

detailed, and by no means uncritical, information on the actual application of

communist ideology. After years of journalism he seemed to have become

convinced that this approach had ignored the voices of individuals, lost in the

focus on the masses. How best to enable these voices to emerge? The question

was explicitly posed and elaborated in his own diaries. Tutino himself not only

kept a daily diary for many years but came from a family background in which his

parents had kept a diary, and his brother and one of his daughters had eachwritten

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autobiographies. So his background, personal practice and ideological

commitment all encouraged the idea that individual voices could best be heard

through their own writings and the narration of their lives (Iuso 2012a).

With three decades of activity, more than 7,000 texts collected, its own

journal and initiatives attracting general and academic attention, the ADN has

been an unquestionable success. Several factors help to explain it. First, Tutino

succeeded in attracting the active and continuing involvement of young people

from Pieve itself – Luca Ricci is an example – and from the surrounding area.

Their role in organizing the archive, publicizing it online and helping to get

some of the autobiographies published has been fundamental. Second, the ADN

immediately received support from Pieve’s municipal council which provided it

with the legal basis for its existence in perpetuity, offered free use of the public

buildings to house the archive, and provided financial assistance, in particular by

assuming the cost of the salaries of two employees. Third, Tutino, the town’s

mayor and local enthusiasts quickly grasped that the creation of a national

memory bank in a town with few resources, just 3,500 inhabitants and largely

destroyed in 1944, could nonetheless benefit from the attraction exercised by the

surrounding Tuscan towns rich in art and culture (Anghiari, Sansepolcro and

Monterchi, for example) and achieve a distinctive place in the region’s tourism

circuit. Pieve would create its own novel form of patrimony in the shape of an

archive of memories and would thus recover the visibility that had vanished as a

result of destruction in the war. Fourth, Tutino’s own reputation and extensive

network of contacts helped, on one hand, to secure the presence of nationally

known cultural figures to serve on the Prize jury and attend the award

ceremonies and, on the other, to attract the regular interest of press, radio and

television. Among the many regular visitors to the ADN from the world of film

and theatre, Nanni Moretti has made a particular contribution by converting

some of the personal stories from the archive into short films. Thus, thanks to the

combination of those factors, in the course of the past thirty years the Archive has

achieved the original ambition to become the ‘capital of Italian memory’.

Tutino’s conviction that the ADN must become the place where individuals

have the opportunity to leave traces of their unique voices has been fundamental

to its work. However, although that goal might seem simply to copy the

objectives of some of the archives I have already mentioned, the distinctive way

it has been interpreted should not be missed. For the ADN the text is neither

simply material for a ‘history from below’ nor just an anthropological occasion

to provide an opportunity to be heard to people whose voices are usually

inaudible or ignored. Rather, the researchers invited to contribute to the

Archive’s work should collaborate with the autobiographies’ authors in

constructing new texts out of the originals. Once Tutino had learned of the

existence of other archives, this preferred method of working became the rule.

He linked to the ADN’s activities a number of academic specialists in life-

histories in an effort to create a kind of open laboratory, establishing in 1995 a

scientific committee to oversee the appropriateness of the work undertaken on

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the texts. However, giving equal respect to the perspectives of the academics, the

demands of the ADN and the expectations of the authors proved very difficult.

In fact, in 2004 after two conferences and a few publications the committee was

disbanded, caught up in the dilemma marking every discussion on the

publication of the kinds of text the ADN received – and particularly central in

the case of Terra matta. Should they be published exactly as they had been

written? Or was it legitimate to intervene on them to facilitate both reading and

publication? The intellectuals on the committee favoured scientific rigour; but

the interest of the ADN was to secure publication and the widest possible

diffusion of its texts. However, the disbanding of the committee has not meant

the end of collaboration with its members. The journal Primapersona has become

a meeting-place for intellectuals and non-professional authors, supporting the

right not only to write one’s own memoirs but also to debate how they should

best be used and circulated.

New frontier

At present the ADN is developing a new initiative in the form of the

digitalization of its archive. From the outset its policy had been to insist on visits

to the archive in person in order to consult the texts. To reach this out-of-the-

way place was understood as a kind of pilgrimage, an analogy to the retracing of

the path of memory itself, which only a few dozen people managed each year.

It was a destination to be reached only with difficulty so that the several

thousand life-histories with all their individual and collective significance could

be appreciated in quasi-seclusion. From the Archive’s point of view, the

necessity of the journey to Pieve underpinned a conception of the institution as

part of Italy’s heritage to be appreciated only in situ and thus an irreplaceable

feature of the cultural and tourist circuit.

However, technical advances create both new demands and new ways to

preserve heritage. The symbolic emphasis on the uniqueness of the Archive’s

remote physical location has been reversed: openness has replaced restrictiveness

of access with the intention of enabling the ADN to enhance its reputational

aura by the dissemination of its patrimony rather than simply by the storage of

specific contents. The process of digitalization, now two years old, began with

the most famous document stored at the archive: the life-history written on a

bed-sheet by an Emilian peasant, Clelia Marchi, who had begun to make use of

this component of her dowry for her autobiography shortly after being widowed

(Marchi 2012).9 The sheet is displayed each year at the award ceremony for the

Prize but has to be preserved under glass for the rest of the year. Digitalization

therefore made this document available in a way that had been impossible until

then. Within very few years the entire contents of the Archive will become

available online, enabling for the first time not only a much wider appreciation

of the material form of the original documents but also the expansion of

comparative research on their contents.

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Archive effect

In conclusion, I want to note a largely unanticipated consequence of the

establishment of archives for autobiography. Perhaps it could have been

imagined many years ago when Saverio Tutino gave instructions to the first

group of readers of the texts entered for the Prize on how to sort out false from

genuine autobiographies.10 ‘False’ in this context refers to those texts composed

with the specific intention of participating in the Pieve Prize as if it were a

literary competition, identifiable by the incongruities of dates and the

improbability of details and by reference to the actual lives of their authors. The

genuine autobiographies had then to be read with extreme respect for the lives

narrated, to be ‘listened to on tiptoe’ as Tutino suggested, and for judgements on

their authors to be suspended in favour of concentration simply on the texts.

The problem of how to assess those writings, mostly ungrammatical and usually

unable to translate the details into a coherent narrative, remained. At this point it

became vital to distinguish between the life and the ability to recount it,

between grammar and the ability to convey happenings, emotions and

sentiments without recourse to any literary skill. Of course readers were not to

succumb to any pointless fascination exercised by ‘exotic’ ungrammatical texts

or to the temptation to consider poor writing in itself a criterion of a good

autobiography. Texts needed to communicate effectively either exceptional

events or everyday events that might have happened to anyone, representative in

some unspecified sense of a common social reality.

The very existence of ‘false autobiographies’ showed how the Pieve Prize had

come to be known about and attract the attention of some ambitious authors.

It also points to a further consequence: the appearance of genuine

autobiographies that had been written not spontaneously but with the specific

intention of competing for the Prize. They have now been a reality for at least

fifteen years, revealed by the insertion of space on the document consigning the

text to the archive in which authors are invited to say why they have written

their autobiographies: in several cases it contains the honest declaration that the

primary motivation had been to enter for the Prize. In other words, the Archive

has indirectly provided not only encouragement to life-writing but also specific

models – in the shape of the prizewinning texts that have already been

published – for composition. This is one way in which the array of

autobiographies, at least in Europe, can in part derive from a practice that is

much less spontaneous than might be imagined. In the past, the contexts that

have prompted people to write down their lives have been various: the tribunals

of the Inquisition, the training-schools of communist parties, the academies of

the seventeenth century, and the asylums of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries for the mentally ill. Of course we do not yet have the means of

assessing the scale or quality of the autobiographies involuntarily solicited by the

very existence of the archives themselves. But, as is particularly clear in the

method of calling for contributions that the Polish archives adopted, they have

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come to occupy a perhaps increasingly important place in a system of cultural

circularity, unimagined when the ADN was established.

Notes

1 The term ‘archive for autobiographies’ (archivio autobiografico), which appears for thefirst time in Lejeune (1991) indicates a centre with the status of foundation orassociation to store autobiographical texts written by non-professional writers.

2 Although the original project was abandoned in the 1950s, it was revived in the1980s; the entire archive is now stored at the University of Sussex. Details of thepublications deriving from the original and later materials can be found on the MassObservation website at: http://www.massobs.org.uk/publications_1974_onwards.htm.

3 The papers presented at the seminars were published in the journalMateriali di lavoro.For further information on the archive’s work and publications, see http://fondazione.museostorico.it/index.php/Progetti/Principali-ambiti-tematici-di-ricerca/Archivio-della-scrittura-popolare.

4 The list of members gives a sense of their variety: Archives of Popular Writing basedin Trento, Genoa and Este, the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, Bibliotecainformatizzata dei Libri di Famiglia; the Centro cultura popolare in Alessandria,the Coordinamento centri demologici toscani in Siena, the SovrintendenzaArchivistica Toscana in Florence, the association ‘I giorni cantati’ in Rome, theAlfabetismo e cultura scritta centre at the University of Perugia, the Archivio dellacultura di base in Bergamo, the Centro iniziative culturali in Bolognetta (Palermo) aswell as individual adherents from the universities of Siena, Bari, Verona, Pavia,Trieste, Milan and from the Piedmont regional administration. Work at the archive atthe University of Genoa, directed by the historian Antonio Gibelli and containingmainly autobiographical accounts, was particularly important in creating a grassrootshistory of the 1914–18 war. For a general survey of the work of such archives increating a ‘history from below’, see Lyons (2010, 2012).

5 Especially interesting in this genre is the 400-page transcription of the life recountedby a Tuscan woman, Io so nata a Santa Lucia. Il racconto autobiografico di una donna toscanatra mondo contadino e societa d’oggi (Di Piazza and Mugnaini 1988).

6 The book included an influential essay on the concept of ‘popular Italian’ (italianopopolare) by the linguist Tullio De Mauro (Rossi 1970, 43–75).

7 For information on his work see his website: http://www.autopacte.org/.8 For the history of the ADN and the importance of Tutino’s role, see two issues of theADN’s journal Primapersona: 2004, 12, ‘Vent’anni di archivio’; 2012, 25, ‘CaroSaverio’. The story of the Archive has also been reworked as a piece for the theatre,written and performed by Mario Perrotta (Perrotta 2009).

9 See Iuso (2012b) for a preliminary analysis of the relation between women’s writing,needlework and embroidery.

10 On the role of the various groups of readers, see Ricci and Santangelo (2014), in thisissue.

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