Nuto Revelli is a key figure in the history of 20th-century Italy; he lived through the entire period, bearing witness through his own life experiences to the political, economic and social upheavals that helped shape it: the Second World War, the
Resistenza, of which he was one of the commanders, the birth of democracy, the industrialization, the mass workers’ movements and the cold war in the Italian Republic.
Among Nuto’s literary masterpieces is -
Il mondo dei vinti - (The World of the Vanquished), a lucid and collective account of the remnants of Alpine civilization.
This was based on hundreds of interviews conducted between 1970 and 1984 with a tape recorder as he travelled through the impoverished countryside of the province of Cuneo, in Piedmont.
All these autobiographical accounts in Patois, Occitan and Piedmontese, are contained in the digital archive which will be launched and made available online in 2027, to mark the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication.
In this presentation, we will explore this unique archive with the aid of audio clips subtitled in English, and we will travel through its main themes: emigration, hunger and despair, the wars seen by the people, and the memory of a civilization which had endured for millennia and crumbled so easily under the onslaught of progress at any cost.
Can the voices of the defeated – those who have been excluded from the neo-liberal plunder – show us a way forward, a genuine transition in which we can finally make our home on Earth?
