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Pieve Santo Stefano lies on the borders of Tuscany, Umbria and Romagna. Since 1984 it has had at the four corners of it's city limits, where each road approaches, a large yellow sign under the official city name that reads: “City of the Diary”. This small community hosts a public archive that collects writings of ordinary people. In them we see reflected, in various forms, the lives of Italians and the history of Italy. There are diaries, epistolaries and autobiographical memoirs. The city itself, located in the Tuscan-Emillian Appenines, was almost completely destroyed during world war II, and amongst the few buildings to remain standing was the Palazzo Comunale, the town hall, in the shape of an 'L' like a book open on a lectern, with the city's coats-of-arms on the wall.
Forty years after the end of the war, in a wing of this building, a house of memory has been created: a public home for the conservation of private writings and memories. The initiative has attracted the attention of scholars and journalists from all over Italy and abroad. Founded by Saverio Tutino, the archive not only conserves extracts of popular writing, as a museum, but also aims to develop, in various ways, the riches which are stored there. After having been popularly labeled a 'bank of memories', we ourselves have called it a 'nursery', since in the Archive the manuscripts of the past come back to life, 'resprouting' each season and attracting new interest in autobiographical writing.
In the beginning, as an incentive for the arrival of material, we had the idea of creating a competition, ll Premio Pieve – Banca Toscana (The Pieve Prize). We published a small advert in various newspapers and within a few weeks more than 100 texts and collections of letters had arrived. The archive now conserves almost 5000 items. And each year, as a result of the competition, the number increases by at least another 150.
In 1991, under the initiative of the city of Pieve Santo Stefano, the Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (National Diary Archive Foundation) was created, which recently gained charity status. Since September 1998, the archive has published a twice-yearly journal entitled Primapersona, which is on sale at Feltrinelli bookshops throughout Italy and via subscription from the Archive. In 2001 the diaries of the Archive entered the world of cinema, in the initiative I diari della Sacher (the diaries of Sacher).
Since October 2001 this internet site has hosted a message board called Pagine, updated every two months, which gives space to autobiographical extracts from the texts of the archive. The message board is maintained by the editors of this site with the collaboration of the Reading Commission. Another message board called Soldiario has also been launched. This hosts a collection of memories connected to the role of money in the lives of the Italian people. This initiative is hosted by the site SoldiOnline.
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