La memoria dei luoghi. Gli storici locali in Piemonte tra Ottocento e Novecento

[Machine translation] The book “The memory of places. Local historians in Piedmont between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, the result of extensive research on the territories of Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta, is divided into four parts, each of which reflects a specific aspect of the study of local history. The first section — Territories and Local Historiographies: The Multiplicity of a Region — includes six essays that analyze historians active in specific Piedmontese territories, paying particular attention to the local historiography of the Alpine valleys. In the second part of the book - Local history: a genre for many professionals - a series of contributions have been grouped together that present the life and work of authors who have approached local history coming from very different social backgrounds and professional paths: doctors, jurists, printers, employees, public administrators, nobles, etc. A plurality of experiences that all converge on local history: a cultural commitment that unites people who in life worked in the most disparate fields and for whom the Writing about local history originated mainly from love for one's country, as well as from historical curiosity. The third part — Between scholarship and pastoral action: clergymen and local history — is dedicated to clergymen who wrote works of local history in the 19th and 20th centuries, often still fundamental today. That between the clergy and local history is a lasting combination, rooted throughout Europe and of which we have significant testimonies in Piedmont, especially among parish priests and vice-parish priests, but also among professors of ecclesiastical history in seminaries. The fourth part — From local history to ethnography — includes three contributions in which local history intersects with anthropological and ethnographic contents. This is a central hub, important not only for the history of local historiography but also for the study of the origins of demo-ethno-anthropological disciplines in our region, as well as for understanding the genesis of many investigations on the rural world., Local historians are undoubtedly paradigmatic figures in Italian society of the 19th and 20th centuries, a widespread and widespread presence, over the two centuries, in many communities of the Peninsula. From cities to smaller villages, there are in fact many places whose history has been studied, the subject of essays and monographs, by often non-professional authors, moved by multiple motivations in this intellectual commitment. These are people from different human and cultural backgrounds who at a certain point in their lives felt the need to write, especially for the benefit of their fellow citizens, the history of their country. The objective of this volume is to reflect concretely on these figures, that is, trying to understand how local historians represent a significant element of both Italian history and historiography. Through numerous bio-bibliographic studies, relating in particular to Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta, the “history of local history” is analyzed both starting from a series of specific territories and presenting individual figures of intellectuals who have dedicated themselves to the study of the history of their small homeland. This is a story that is not only civic and institutional history, but also opens up to significant and original contributions in the field of ethnography and the study of popular cultures., Looking today at the life and work of those who have dedicated years, sometimes decades, to investigating the local history of Piedmontese municipalities is also a way to give thanks to these scholars, whose work has often been negatively interpreted and too hastily accused of amateurism. Paraphrasing when Michel Foucault referred to nineteenth-century psychiatrists, one could say that it's easy to laugh at local historians of the 19th century, while one should rather recognize the seriousness and rigor of the method, which must always be judged in relation to the tools and knowledge of the time. After all, it is also thanks to their silent and unknown work that in many communities today it is possible to read and learn about the history of places, claiming and factually practicing the “right to a bit of local history”, as Zadie Smith has effectively emphasized: a cultural legacy that is still relevant, the one left to us by local historians with their works, which still speaks to us and enriches us.