Filologia forense e digitale d’autore, con un esempio sul caso Fortini

The emergent exigencies posed by Born-digital Literary Archives have increasingly become a pivotal concern for Memory Institutions engaged in the archival preservation of Modern and Contemporary Authors. Institutions are frequently confronted with the intricate task of managing an mixture of paper materials and Born-digital content (often with its physical hardware), thereby engendering a novel paradigm of hybrid archives. This topic has been under discussion for years, and significant advancements have been made in understanding and managing Born-digital materials, including the development of best practices for preservation and making collections accessible to Scholars, as well as publishing guides for Donors and for Digital Curators. Despite this progress, there remains a sense that more needs to be done, given the ongoing methodological and practical challenges faced in handling Born-digital archives. The aim of the paper is to articulate a theoretical underpinning addressing the intricacies inherent in Born-digital Literary Archives, whilst delineating some pertinent Italian case studies, with an emphasis on the project centered around the Franco Fortini Archive, which is hosted at the Biblioteca di Area Umanistica of the University of Siena. Fortini purchased his first Macintosh in the mid-1980s, thanks to the compensation from the Montale-Guggenheim Prize for his book Paesaggio con serpente (Einaudi 1984). After his death, his primary last computer, a Macintosh SE/30, was backed up by three collaborators on 3.5-inch floppy disks. Thanks to a project funded by the University of Siena, the floppy disks have been now recovered alongside a collection of audio cassettes (which contain recordings of lectures, radio interventions, and other types of content). The Born-digital materials complete the picture along with numerous computer printouts and extensive collection of manuscripts materials of the paper archive: thus, Fortini’s case represents a valuable example of a hybrid archive of a 20th-century Italian Author, offering an exemplary test bed for archival and philological research.