“First of all, let’s go learn something”

Abstract

This article presents a “story of Oral history” in Italy, from the beginning to today, dwelling in particular on the 70-90s and on the directions of the new millennium. Oral interviews are stories “from below”, where the authorship is shared between the interviewed people and an empathic interviewer. Explored for decades in the Anglo-Saxon context, only recently the discipline obtained its own autonomy and academic dignity in Italy, overcoming a long-lasting scepticism about its “reliability”. In the 1980s, archival institutions began to take an interest in oral history, because it became then clear that “domestic” conservation could not give any guarantees of preservation and accessibility to these unique sources. The bibliographic selection offered by this essay well illuminates how this approach can be employed to study in an innovative way the most various historical phenomena: the Resistance, the story of the unions, the lesbian movement, migrations, tragic events such as earthquakes, and much more.