Città Di Parole: Storia Orale Di Una Periferia Romana (review)

Among the well-known phrases attributed to the writer Leo Tolstoy, we can find one that could be used not only for literature, but also for oral history: "If you want to be universal, paint your own village." It helps to explain why a book such as Città di parole: Storia orale di una periferia romana [City of Words: An Oral History of a Roman Neighborhood] can be exciting and suitable to read even for oral history practitioners with no particular interest in Italian history, but committed to the listening of life stories and to their transformation into polyphonic texts. The volume - essentially based on narrated words - results from a collaborative research project on Centocelle, the Rome's Seventh District, a working-class area that has developed after the installation of an airport, in 1909. It is another initiative on memory and culture encouraged by the important historical institution Circolo Gianni Bosio, which the authors of Città di Parole are connected to.

Renowned oral historian Alessandro Portelli - who, although he has never written any type of "manual," has created a corpus of scholarship that has became a model for oral history studies worldwide - is one of those researchers, accompanied by Bruno Bonomo, Alice Sotgia, and Ulrike Viccaro, historians devoted to the study of oral and urban history. Together, they created a broad, complex, and stimulating portrait of a vibrant periphery in which meaningful aspects of contemporary life as a whole converge: migrations, political struggles, social movements, cultural actions, challenges for the future, and a myriad of problems facing large cities.

The book has eight thematic chapters which are preceded by an introductory text that right away exposes its raw material: "stories which are not representative, but are exemplary. In the sense that they do not consist of a statistical sample, nor of an 'objective' and 'exhaustive' reconstruction of events in Centocelle and its surroundings.' Rather, they outline a range of possibilities" (3). With this orientation we move into intersecting landscapes: the Centocelle district composed of 208 acres and 57,000 inhabitants, and the Centocelle district as narrated by more than 120 voices.

The chapters explore the various issues and aspects of life in Centocelle: 1: The land and the air; 2: Notes on population growth and urban development of the district; 3: The flowers and the asphalt; 4: In war; 5: Continuity and changes; 6: The car and the market; 7 Movements; and 8: Third Millennium. A full list of the narrators follows the substantive chapters, which is an excellent feature and one that is characteristic of Portelli's work. Its presence denotes not only that the authors accept their scholarly responsibility to account for their sources, but it also reinforces the role of oral memories in the book while contextualizing the narratives: we know who, when, and where a particular statement was given.

At the same time it is important to stress that these are not the only sources used. Especially (but not exclusively) in chapter 2, the authors demonstrate deep knowledge of information obtained from complementary material, such as previous research, articles and books, official acts, and census data - which is implicit in the dialogic character of certain interview excerpts, and explicit in the interwoven, clarifying passages. It reminds us of Portelli's statement in The Order Has Been Carried Out: ". . .I do not make 'history with oral sources only,' as the saying goes. Yet, oral sources are what interest me" (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 16).

Certain peculiarities within the oral histories are confirmed by passages that show, for instance, processes of memory-making ("My name is Antonella Pepe and now I'm a little excited, my mind just went blank, I don't remember anything" [56]); connections between individual events and collective marks ("My discovery of the Beatles. . . I don't remember if it happened in a little bar at Piazza Dei Mirti. . .but I was like. . .awashed by that music...