Maitardi

Maitardi is the quarterly of the Historical Institute of Sienese Resistance and Contemporary Age

• Responsible Director: Silvia Folchi
• Editorial staff: Fabio Masotti, Laura Mattei, Francesca Vannozzi

Maitardi is the meager message with which Nuto Revelli concludes his diary of Russia, at the end of the dramatic experience of the Italian defeat which inevitably marks the human and political turning point of the Alpine officer. Never too late to understand, never too late to draw the full conclusions, never too late to make a choice that proves to be indispensable. Two dry words on a blank page, to sanction the meaning of an appointment, the one with moral and political redemption, whose echo and significance we want to relaunch today. We chose the evocative power of these naked words to give the title to our magazine. What we propose, even with the measured demands that can be made of the forces of our peripheral Institute, is an approach to the interpretation of our recent past and an invitation to dwell on contents (on values) through which we believe it is possible to base or refound the analysis and the critical vision of the present days and the new conflicts that involve us, but which at times have little impact on us. knowingly we cross. Today more than ever, the reality of the present needs to be read and interpreted with a richness of ideas and critical intelligence.

Our work must be understood, in short, as an invitation to reappropriate the meaning of history, which we often feel alien, as if the mass information, consumer culture, the news market, were reasoning for us, sparing us the trouble of thinking, knowing, judging, remaining vigilant in the face of revisionism and disruption. Facts and truths involving time are produced for the use of the power of turn. To turn back, sometimes, is not to regress. It is to rediscover the stages of a path that perhaps we have burned with little awareness, with the compulsive haste of a progress that could also turn out to be empty, imposed, to be consumed. Or, and because of us, a path we took for granted, celebrating it with increasingly abstract rituals until we moved away from it.

Maitardi is therefore the new periodical of the Historical Institute of Sienese Resistance and Contemporary Age. It stems from a number of needs that we felt particularly pressing: firstly, the need to widen the circle, to propose to the outside the Institute’s activities, ranging from research to teaching, from the collection and preservation of archival materials to the publication of studies; secondly, the desire to stimulate a debate on the issues we deal with: our work is mainly dedicated to the history of Novec. Finally, the need to establish closer contact with our members, whom we invite from now on to collaborate in the activities of the Institute and in the vitality of its periodical.

(Editorial of n°1, October 2004)