Alcide De Gasperi’s correspondence presented to the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella

11/06/2019 Thanks to a work that started over two years ago, and that is still in progress, the Digital Humanities Unit has built a large digital archive of letters written and received by the statesman from Trentino.

The correspondence of the statesman from Trentino was digitized and published online thanks to a MiBAC national project advanced by Fondazione Trentina Alcide De Gasperi, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Istituto Luigi Sturzo of Rome and the De Gasperi family.

The FBK Digital Humanities Unit, led by Sara Tonelli, is the technical partner of the project and, in these two years, has worked on the development of a platform that, on the one hand, helps historians and archivists track and catalog the sources in the various archives, while, on the other hand, gives back to the public a public list with original documents, transcripts and other interesting and useful information to build further research.

What is given back on the correspondence website is a large collection of documents, many scanned in very high resolution, transcription and other information such as the type of document, the date, the sender, the abstract, the place it is kept and the state of preservation.

Currently, over 106 cultural institutions and archives from 9 countries have participated in the initiative. This research is very advanced in the US, in Germany and in Austria and in the coming months we will start working with the French and English archives. The Central State Archive is working on an inventory of documents, and one at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will follow. The work, which is expected to be completed in 2021, avails itself of a national scientific committee composed of the most important experts in De Gasperi.

The Alcide De Gasperi National Edition epistolary project is also supported by the Caritro Foundation and the Cariplo Foundation.