Abstract
In November 2012, I was attending a conference in Sanremo, about five hundred kilometers from Rome. On the last night, a young man I vaguely recognized approached me and asked if we could talk. We moved aside and he reminded me that I had interviewed him a few years before in Monterotondo, near Rome, about the town’s antifascist history. With tears in his eyes, he told me that he had driven all night because his uncle—a former partisan, who I had also interviewed—read that I was at the conference and wanted me to know that he was nearing death. Also, he had something to say about the Resistance, which he had never told anyone, and he would tell me the story if I went to see him. For me, that initial interview with this man was interesting but it was one of many. I did not realize that to him it was a significant moment of self-expression and its meaning lasted well beyond the duration of our encounter.
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Notes
Alessandro Portelli, “Research as an Experiment in Equality,” in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 29–44.
See Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories; Biografia di una citt a : Storia e memoria, Terni 1831–1985 (Turin: Einaudi, 1985); The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (New York: Palgrave, 2003) (originally published in Italian as L’ordine e stato eseguito. Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria (Rome: Donzelli, 2003); They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Dante Bartolini, interview by author, Terni, Italy, April 4, 1972. Also see Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories; The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
For a full documentary of this experience, see Valentino Paparelli and Alessandro Portelli, La Valnerina ternana. Un’esperienza di ricerca-intervento (Rome: Squilibri, 2011).
Charles Hardy III and Alessandro Portelli, “I Can Almost See the Lights of Home: A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky. An Essay-In-Sound,” Journal for MultiMedia History 2 (1999), available at http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol2no1/lights.html.
See David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983);
Steve Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).
Eduardo De Filippo, Non e vero … ma ci credo (1942), in I capolavori di Eduardo, Turin, Einaudi, 1971.
Alessandro Portelli, “Lutto, senso comune, mito e politica nella memoria della strage di Civitella,” in Storia e memoria di un massacro ordinario, ed. Leonardo Paggi (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996);
Leonardo Paggi, ed., Le memoria della Repubblica (Florence: la Nuova Italia, 1999).
Emily Dickinson, “A word is dead,” in Thomas H. Johnson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), no. 1212.
Ernesto de Martino, “Etnologia e cultura nazionale negli ultimi dieci anni,” Societ a IX (1953): 3.
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© 2013 Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki
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Portelli, A. (2013). Afterword. In: Sheftel, A., Zembrzycki, S. (eds) Oral History Off the Record. PALGRAVE Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339652_16
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