Exciting news: A reader has just sent me a connection to an article that appeared on August 19 in the New York Times. It seems that Italy already has a diary archive, containing 7,000 memoirs written by “ordinary” people. It is located in Pieve Santo Stefano, Italy, now known as the “City of Diaries.”
The project was begun in 1984 by Saverio Tutino, a foreign correspondent. The current director is Natalia Cangi.
Go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/world/europe/a-trove-of-diaries-meant-to-be-read-by-others.html
I have no news on the National Diary Archive for the USA. I am currently so involved with my final attempt to succeed with a brick and mortar used, out-of-print and rare bookstore that I have little time for the archive. (I work six days a week.) The archive needs funding. If The Eclectic Reader bookstore succeeds, so will the archive.
I have had an interesting donation for the archive this summer- a “commonplace book,” which is a scrapbook of letters, copies of poems, articles and pictures cut out of newspapers dating from 1870 to 1881. The only clue as to ownership of this book is the name William Robertson of Glasgow on a certificate of the National Secular Society from 1879. There are references to Glasgow, Santa Rosa, California, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The scrapbook is definitely religious in nature. The creator of this book could have been a minister. It came to me from the estate of a minister. The handwriting is exquisite, but often hard to read. I’ll try to do a post on it soon.
Tags: diary archives, Italy's National Diary Archive Foundation
National Diary Archive 
August 24, 2014 at 5:07 am |
Cynthia Manuel, thank you for sharing the link to the New York Times feature about Italy’s and other European nations’ diary and journal archives and their European Association for the Autobiography. Saverio Tutino’s summary is informative, and it’s appropriate that Pieve Santo Stefano, the town where the Italian archive is located, is known as “The City of Diaries.”
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