Archives of 20th century people

‘Archives of 20th century people’ is a research project on contemporary personal archives in Veneto, carried out between 2009 and 2017 by the Veneto Region in partnership with Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche.

The aim of the research, which was carried out in several stages, was the systematic recognition of an increasingly widespread archival reality that requires special attention and specific disciplinary cognitive approaches, both due to the quantity and nature of the materials contained in the fonds and their relevance as a source of study for contemporary history and culture.

The survey started in the province of Treviso, with a presentation of the first results during the meeting Archivi di persona nel trevigiano: tra memorie e identità da scoprire (Treviso, 28 April 2010). It then continued in the provinces of Belluno and Vicenza and concluded with Padua, Rovigo, Venice and Verona.

The mapping returned a very articulated archival heritage, consisting of thousands of fonds of both public and private property. The contents and cultural contexts of the documentation are very diverse and therefore lend themselves to potentially multiple cognitive insights and various lines of research.

Archival data from the survey are stored and periodically updated within a database that can be consulted on request at the Region, while a part of the funds is described within the Regional Archival Information System SIAR Veneto and is therefore available for public consultation.

The working archive formed in the course of the project (publications on the people and fonds, various documents related to the valorisation activities of the archives surveyed) is instead available at the archives of the Benetton Foundation.

It is available online Archives of people in Veneto. A project to discover, make known and recount the lives hidden in the papers , 2018 (Pdf file 1.5 MB), the dossier that collects and analyses the research findings.