A two-day event dedicated to history, with a capital S, and to the role that the new means of mass communication have in preserving it, narrating it and spreading it. The initiative, entitled “Public history. Memory, audiovisual sources and digital archives”, is promoted by Intesa Sanpaolo until Thursday 28 March at the Gallerie d'Italia in Piazza della Scala, in Milan, in collaboration with the Ce.RTA – Television and Audiovisual Research Centre.
The event, which gravitates around the theme of the relationship between media, history, memory and television, will be attended by some leading industry experts including Jerome Bourdon, of Tel Aviv University, a leading international media specialist, Paolo Mieli, historian and journalist, Serge Noiret, of the European University Institute among the main scholars of Public History, in addition to the exponents of the main Italian television channels Mediaset, Sky, LA7, RAI.
Thursday in particular is dedicated to a reflection on the function of digital audiovisual archives, with interventions, among others, by Guido Guerzoni, of the Luigi Bocconi University, of Agostino Giovagnoli and Massimo Scaglioni e Anna Sfardini of the Catholic University of Milan and a round table with the main managers of archives and museum and historical institutions, including Barbara Costa, Head of the Intesa Sanpaolo Historical Archive e Sergio Toffetti, President of the Cinema Museum of Turin.
The contents of the conference
In a period in which there is talk of a "need for history", of “public use of history” and the active relationship between History and Memory, the conference focuses on what the new means of communication can concretely offer historians and the public, what they can be asked to offer also in relation to our vast audiovisual heritage. Institutions and communication professionals, archivists and historians, media scholars and the world of culture reflect on the relationship between audiovisual media and history, a particularly significant field of analysis for the questions it raises and for their impact on understanding the present.
Those who were called "mass media" now overlap, combine, bend with greater flexibility in uses, times and spaces dictated by the individual needs of those who use them. The change is not confined only to technology, but affects "culture" in the broadest and most anthropological sense of the word: a wealth of knowledge, new social conventions and unprecedented expressions of sociability. This corresponds to the diffusion of the concept of public history which refers to the possibility that the historical narration comes out of university classrooms, as well as from conferences or scientific journals, and meets the more or less widespread need to know and reconstruct the past by an audience not necessarily composed of insiders .
The second day is dedicated to the archives and the immense audiovisual heritage of our country. For several decades, historians have felt the need to extend the attention given to sources to the media and their products. The cultural value of audiovisual sources, including television, in addition to being reaffirmed by the different languages with which TV and audiovisual media build a shared memory, today finds new ways of expression through the possibilities of storytelling guaranteed by the most recent technologies and in digitization processes which are investing the archives in terms of conservation, circulation and use of materials.
The world of archives
Since there is no official statistic on their total number, quantitative information on the national archival panorama can be deduced from the collation of the various information available on the different types of institutional archives, a calculation that excludes personal archives that are not restricted and/or supervised by the archival Superintendencies.
These are the numbers:
- 100 locations of the State Archives, to which are added 33 detached Sections and the Central State Archive. The State Archives are present in every provincial capital city, while the Sections are present in 33 non-provincial capital cities.
- 8.224 archives of territorial public bodies, of which 8.100 of the Municipalities.
- 50.000 non-territorial public bodies (universities, cultural institutions, chambers of commerce).
- 3.800 supervised private archives (natural persons and private legal entities, family archives, companies, political parties, etc.).
- 29.000 ecclesiastical and parish archives.
The unit of measure, the linear kilometre, provides an initial impressive idea of their extraordinary consistency: in the State Archives alone, which possess a minimal portion of the national archival heritage, there are 1.300 kilometers of documents, in fact the length of Italy.
Safeguarding twentieth-century photographic archives is of strategic importance that goes beyond their patrimonial or cultural dimension, as it involves the protection of the sources - and interpretative pluralism - of the recent history of our country, the definition of new policies for the conservation, management and enhancement of twentieth-century cultural heritage, the reflection on the didactic function that these sources will perform in the immediate future.
In fact, it is a question of a very large patrimony: the most prudent evaluations estimate the existence in Italy of about 6.000 photographic archives, variously distributed among public, private, editorial and corporate archives; of these, those who have undertaken digitization processes, often partial, are around 500, compared to hundreds of millions of positives and negatives, to a very large extent unpublished.
The protection of this extraordinary heritage also passes through private entities such as Intesa Sanpaolo, which in 2015 acquired the large Publifoto photographic archive: about 6-7 million photographs, on various supports, dating from the beginning of the thirties to the nineties of the twentieth century on all the events, personalities, extraordinary happenings that could interest the publishing market. Publifoto, for a long time one of the most important photojournalistic agencies in Italy, in fact supplied the newspapers with prints with detailed captions for the editing of the articles.
The Archive therefore consists of analogue photographs, mostly in black and white, color slides and rare color prints on politics, news, foreign affairs, customs, society, culture and sport. A selection of 200 of these photographs will be on display from 13 April to 7 July in the exhibition “In the Viewfinder. Italy and the world in the Publifoto Intesa Sanpaolo Archive 1939-1981” created by Intesa Sanpaolo at Camera – Italian Center for Photography (Turin, via delle Rosine 18) curated by Aldo Grasso and Walter Guadagnini.
