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  • Biography of an Industrial Town: Terni, Italy, 1831–2014 by Alessandro Portelli
  • Steve Soper
Biography of an Industrial Town: Terni, Italy, 1831–2014
Alessandro Portelli
Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017
v–xxii + 400 pp., $109.99 (cloth); $109.99 (paper); $84.99 (ebook)

Anglophone students of modern Italian history can wait decades for classic works to appear in translation. In what may be an extreme example, almost a half century passed before Federico Chabod’s history of Italian foreign policy came out in English. The wait for Alessandro Portelli’s outstanding oral history of Terni, the historic center of steel production in modern Italy, has only taken thirty years, perhaps because Portelli produced the English translation himself. Regardless, the publication in English of Biografia di una città (1985), together with the shorter, follow-up study of Terni, which Portelli published in Italy in 2008, is nothing less than a cause for celebration. From start to finish, Portelli’s collective portrait of Italian steelworkers and their town is fascinating.

In a short but brilliant introduction on the sources and methods of oral history, Portelli prepares the reader for the fragmented yet fluid narrative to come. Biography of an Industrial Town is a coherent, chronological history of Terni and its workers: Portelli begins in the nineteenth century with his oldest interviewees’ memories of their grandparents’ tales. He charts the rise of socialism and labor activism across the turn of the twentieth century, dedicates four riveting chapters to Terni under fascism and the horrors of the Second World War, and ends with a pair of chapters on the first four decades of postwar economic recovery and decline. Portelli mostly stays in the background of this narrative, as master editor and occasional commentator, allowing the voices and memories of the people of Terni to shape their own histories. Some chapters incorporate folk songs and epic poems, while in others Portelli supplements interviews with archival records from the period. Occasionally just two alternating speakers are featured, but in most sections of the book Portelli weaves together the recollections of five, ten, or fifteen interviewees, a sentence or two here, a long paragraph there. Given this polyphonic and variable structure, it is remarkable how smooth the narrative flow of the book is. The predominance of so many other voices makes Portelli’s interventions noteworthy and intriguing. In some chapters, Portelli steps in to summarize or contextualize a set of fragmentary memories; in others, he provides his own highly original and sensitive interpretation of the interviewees’ statements. As a result, the narrative never seems formulaic or chaotic.

Portelli admires the workers of Terni without romanticizing or simplifying their struggles. In a pair of early chapters on “the making of a working class” and “the subversive tradition,” he combines stories of collective action with evidence of significant divisions, tensions, and disagreements. Thus, a retelling of the successful steelworkers’ strike of 1907 is sandwiched between two examples of division, a discussion of the socialist leadership’s condescending attitude toward women workers at two local textile factories and rival perspectives on the extent of class conflict in Terni. Conflicting accounts of factory occupations in 1919–20 prompt Portelli to connect memories of revolutionary failure to [End Page 162] dreams of success (a form of “uchronia”: history as it might have been). To provide the fullest possible picture of Terni under fascism, Portelli incorporates the statements of men who joined the Fascist Party, and of women whose families were split into pro-and anti-Fascist sides. He records the appeal of Mussolini’s colonial propaganda and reports the critical comments some residents made about partisans during the Second World War. He exposes the unreliability of some epic tales of the Resistance and recognizes that disturbing accounts of partisan violence tend to be either muted or distorted. After 1945, new divisions appeared or sharpened along generational lines as a result of the political splintering of the Left. From beginning to end, however, Portelli shows sympathy for the people of Terni. A regretful, if not tragic, history of “ifs” and “buts” weighs heavily on an exploited and now-declining working class, but the overall effect of listening to the many voices...

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