Le voci dei matti. Il ritrovamento dell'archivio sonoro di Anna Maria Bruzzone

The paper presents the discovering of an oral archive. Anna Maria Bruzzone’s book Ci chiamavano matti. Voci da un ospedale psichiatrico (Einaudi, Torino 1979) contains the testimonies of thirty-seven patients of the Arezzo psychiatric hospital collected in 1977. The book testimonies the patients’ miserable lives inside and outside the hospital and sheds light on the atrocity of their everyday condition by letting them speak for themselves. The author wrote it after a two-month stay in Arezzo, when she spent almost every day in the hospital, attending the general meetings and participating to the lives of the inpatients, in a continuous dialogue of which only a part is collected in the published interviews. The oral recordings on which the book is based were believed to be lost forever. After long and strenuous search I have been able to locate the original tapes. Such discovery is of great magnitude, because the digitisation and cataloguing of this archive would produce the first digital oral archive related to an Italian psychiatric hospital – which was located in the same buildings of my Department (Department of Educational Sciences, Human Sciences and Intercultural Communication of the University of Siena – Arezzo) where also the Historical Archive of the Arezzo psychiatric hospital is hosted.