SALENTOMEGALITIC
GIUGGIANELLO - THE LAND OF PUGLIA'S MEGALITHS
Many stories - the talking archives
A project to promote and enhance 20th-century memorial sites and historical archives in Puglia.
The project is supported by the Puglia Region as part of the "A Journey Through Memory" program.
CUP I39J21017030002- CIG Z95383617A
The “Tante Storie-Gli Archivi Parlanti” project is part of the Puglia Region's program – Department of Tourism, Cultural Economy and Territorial Development, and Teatro Pubblico Pugliese – for projects promoting and enhancing 20th-century sites of memory and Puglia's historical archives.
The Giuggianello (LE) Center for Social Culture and Research is participating in the project “Tante Storie – Gli archivi parlanti,” which has as its main objective the investigation of the historical archives of the municipality of Giuggianello.
This investigation, which began in November 2022 and will continue until January 2023, focused on the first fifty years of the twentieth century in order to further research a period that has not yet been sufficiently studied. It is hoped that documents will be traced from this period, allowing us to reconstruct the image of the small town at the beginning of the 20th century and, consequently, the stories of some of its citizens.
The investigation continues in the private archives of the Giuggianello families with the aim of recovering further documentation, particularly postcards, letters, and photographs, to enrich the historical archive.
The "Tante Storie" project includes several activities to support the research, such as collecting oral histories from those who lived through the first fifty years of the twentieth century, organizing a photography exhibition to give citizens a glimpse of the town as it appeared several decades ago, and publishing the material resulting from the survey, aiming to provide new insights and knowledge of the area.
From the information recovered, we are reconstructing the story of a young citizen of Giuggianello who in the sources is described as "mad", "crazy", "insane" and who died in 1946, at the age of thirty, in the psychiatric hospital of Lecce.
This young man will be given back his dignity by making him the spokesperson for the "Tante Storie" project. A theatrical performance is being built around him, focusing on his short and tormented life.
The project's conclusion, with a meeting to report back to the public and share the results achieved, is scheduled for May 2023.
To meet the diverse project needs, a diverse working group was formed with diverse skills and expertise; from archival and documentary expertise to proven experience in promotion and communications, and even theatrical restitution, the working group was structured to achieve the diverse objectives set for "Tante storie."
La nostra partecipazione ai programmi RAI
Pezzetti d'archivio. la memoria condivisa
Pezzetti d'archivio was a recreational moment for sharing memories and knowledge.
A fun way to delve into the memories of our community—true living archives! It's an opportunity to exchange contacts and arrange dedicated interviews. Indeed, many insights and willingness to participate have emerged from opening up one's personal documentary and photographic archives, thus donating one's own fragment of the archive to the community and thus creating a more beautiful, broader, and more participatory community.
Gli archivi raccontano: l'evento conclusivo il 25 maggio
"Tante Storie – Gli Archivi Parlanti" (Many Stories – The Talking Archives), part of the Puglia Region's program—Department of Tourism, Cultural Economy and Territorial Development, and Teatro Pubblico Pugliese—for the promotion and enhancement of 20th-century sites of memory and Puglia's historical archives, is the title of the project that the Giuggianello Cultural Center created and staged last May 25th.
The project's primary objective, which was also achieved thanks to the voluntary support of members Efrem De Pascalis and Gianni Castiglione, was to conduct a survey of the local historical archives, focusing on the first fifty years of the last century, conducted by Emanuele Pasca and Gloria Iasella.
From here, the restitution to the public both from an archival point of view and in theatrical and cinematographic form.
The unpublished play, "Letters to the Mother," by Giuseppe Semeraro and Marco Bartolo, recounts the brief but intense life of a young man from Giuggiano who, in the most fragile period of his life, finds himself facing war on the battlefield after being rehabilitated from social outcast to military resource by the fascist state, with severe repercussions on his psychiatric condition. This evening, Elena Toscano, a psychiatrist at the SPDC in Casarano, will address the event.
"It's a moving story," explains Giuseppe Vergari, Project Coordinator and President of the CCSR, "which helps us understand how, in those years, vulnerable people were considered a social burden to be marginalized until the war's need arose, and young people were considered mere numbers, cannon fodder, sent to the front to fight an incomprehensible war, certainly one they didn't want, only to be sent back when, perhaps wounded, they were no longer needed."
Cristoforo Mele, a fictitious name, thus becomes the witness of all those young people who shared the same exact fate during the terrible years of the war.
"Cristoforo," explains Giuseppe Semeraro, co-author of the letters, "is a boy who has been robbed of the freedom to become a man, to get married, to give his first kiss to the person he loves. Through the letters he sent to his mother from war zones, and up until the last days of his life, interrupted at the age of thirty in the mental asylum of Lecce, he tries to maintain a relationship with his mother and his family, describing himself and his state of mind, in simple and increasingly ungrammatical lines, in a whirlwind of intense sensations and moods. He seeks the humanity and serenity that were denied him by someone for him."
At the center, therefore, is the dignity of people and their lives, also through the stories collected by Christian Manno in the short film “Corti d'archivio”, which retraces the personal and social events of the hard life in small villages through the use of period photographs from home archives, and now collected in a photographic exhibition, useful for recomposing that collective identity, to be made known and shared with everyone.
Corti d'archivio
Regia di: Christian Manno
con gli interventi di:
Bolognino Remo,
Abbondanza Schito,
Domenica Fracasso.
Musiche di Rocco De Santis.
Con il supporto di Emanuela Pasca, Gloria Iasella, Elena Toscano, Alfredo Bortone, Efrem De Pascalis, Gianni Castiglione, Giuseppe Vergari.
