Clio, ci senti? Fonti e archivi orali per la ricerca storica: il “caso” italiano

There is still a problem of historiographical legitimisation of oral history methodology in Ital-ian universities today. Not only is oral history rarely practiced by contemporary history scholars, but existing oral archives are also not consulted by researchers who would, in fact, be ex-pected to use them given the nature of their studies. Recent historiographical syntheses on the history of Republican Italy written by Italian authors do not make use of oral sources, nor do they reference the historiography that drew on them. In Italy, there are no books that systematically use oral sources to address the country’s social history over the long term. Even with-in the realm of ego-documents used in historiography, “autobiographical writings” (letters, di-aries, memoirs of ordinary people) have achieved far greater legitimisation in Italy than oral sources. This situation has at least three explanations. First, the underdevelopment of sound studies in Italian historiography and the research practices and approaches of many Italian contemporary historians, who tend to prioritize institutional political history and show little interest in social history and the history of collective subjects. Second, there is a problem related to the condition of oral archives: they are difficult to access and they lack tools facilitat-ing their use, such as catalogs, indexes, cards, and transcriptions. Finally, there is an absence of a tested and shared experience of historiographical reuse of “archival oral sources”, mean-ing interviews conducted in the past with individuals and social groups that are no longer accessible to present-day researchers.