Alessandro Portelli, Storie orali. Racconto, immaginazione, dialogo Roma, Donzelli Editore, 2007, pp. 462, € 25,00 Review by Salvatore Vento

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With the publication of the book by Alessandro Portelli, professor of Anglo-American literature at the University “La Sapienza” in Rome, the social history enthusiasts have a key text to study in depth the themes and the concepts of the particular branch of history called “oral history”. Portelli collects his most important essays published in Italy and in the United States, translated for the first time in Italian. This volume accounts for many years of research on oral sources and, in a certain sense, is a sort of handbook and an intellectual autobiography of the author. While reading and translating the essays collected in the book, says Portelli, I was surprised to realize how much time, work and passion I dedicated to something considered by many people as obsolete, and that they called working class. Starting from precise events and places, the analyses of the book elaborate theoretical and methodological general propositions. The interest in testimonies, Portelli clarifies, consists not only in its closeness to facts, but also in spreading apart from them, as in this gap we can retrace the imagination, the symbolic, and the desire.