By Gianluca Cinelli
In the wake of recent studies about Italian participation in the Second World War, this volume fills a gap in historical knowledge by focusing on sources that have been neglected or at least not investigated thoroughly and systematically. These sources are diaries that Italian citizens with different social, professional and geographical backgrounds wrote between 25 July 1943 and the end of the war in the spring of 1945. The author analysed 90 diaries (out of 150 consulted) collected at the Archivio della scrittura popolare in Trento, the Archivio diaristico nazionale in Pieve Santo Stefano, and the Archivio Ligure della scrittura popolare in Genoa. The author chose to focus her investigation on diaries because “in a situation characterized by institutional uncertainties and historical unknowns, such as the one Italy faced between 1943 and 1945, feelings of incongruousness and confusion unsettled people’s usual understandings and disrupted their conventional patterns of interpretation and action” (p. 6). Therefore, the day-to-day practice of diary-writing permits her to observe the “ordinary” as it varies across generation, class, and gender and see through these “marginalised narratives” how “people’s interpretation of historical events from the standpoint of their everyday experience affected their responses to those same events and created new political sensibilities” (p. 28). To do that, the author refers to Raymond William’s analytical tool known as “structures of feeling”, a formula cast to convey the idea of the “felt sense of the quality of life” at a particular historical time (p. 4)…
Close Encounters in War 