"Oral sources are commonly considered last-minute sources, yet they're increasingly in vogue. In Florence, where I've just started working in neighborhoods on the relationships being created with migrants from various communities, research groups, including national ones, are arriving, active in the area. They set out on bicycles from the former tobacco factory (now a coworking complex, editor's note), ride around in the morning, meet people, conduct interviews, and by the end of the evening the investigation is complete. We need to denounce these trends that are so trendy today and distort the necessarily lengthy work we do, because working on oral sources is tiring, and I can no longer tolerate being treated this way. You young people, tell me your point of view. I'm fighting on these things, because funding is going in this direction, and it makes you angry; funding rewards immediacy. In other words, a quick project, a quick result, I'm satisfied. If the project has to be long-term to achieve good results, I don't I pay..." (transcription from YouTube: 2025, Florence, AISO Conference, Final Debate Review, Adriana Dadà's speech, edited by Mario Spiganti).
This is perhaps the last speech at a scientific conference by Adriana, a longtime colleague and former professor at the University of Florence, a longtime anarcho-communist activist and member of the FLC-CGIL, who died on January 28th at the age of 78. The topic of the debate, which she addressed succinctly, was close to her heart. It concerned the discriminatory and opportunistic mechanisms prevalent in a feudalized academy incapable of valorizing the in-depth, long-term work necessary to acquire professional skills. Specifically, it concerned the training and funding of so-called "national research groups." And her tone was as combative as ever.
A student of Gino Cerrito and custodian of his invaluable archive, she belonged to that large (now dwindling) group of historians of Italian anarchism who, in their thirties-between the 1970s and 1980s-had debuted with works that remain remarkable today. This was an era when the so-called historiography of affiliations was still in force, and her book, "Anarchism in Italy between Movement and Party: History and Documents of Italian Anarchism" (Teti, 1984), remained a generous attempt to claim a space of its own for the narrative of the political events of the libertarian movement in our country, perhaps alongside that of other historiographies of the left. With the cultural shift of the 1990s, her research interests shifted elsewhere, particularly to social history, gender, and emigration. Traditional event history, based primarily on archival documents and the primacy of political and military perspectives, was superseded by field research, a focus on relational and experiential dimensions, and attention to individual agency and life stories. Her research on wet nurses and the "barsane" (street vendors from Lunigiana, her homeland) is memorable.
Dear Adriana, we haven't seen each other much over the last fifty years, but I fondly remember our brief exchanges, often polemical but rich in humanity, and I was pleased by your interest in my studies on libertarian currents in Italian trade unions in the post-World War II period. A warm thought for those who loved you, Andrea and Michela.
Giorgio Sacchetti
https://umanitanova.org/adriana-dada-un-ricordo/
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Link: (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #4-26 - Adriana Dadà: A Memory (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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