BLOG: What can a sports stadium teach us about archives? By Diana Garvin

Giulia Riccò Blog Post

What can a sports stadium teach us about archives?

Diana Garvin (University of Oregon)

 

Rome was legendarily founded in 753 B.C.  Since then, Italy has been a republic, an empire, a kingdom, and a fractured mosaic of city states.  What it has rarely been is a nation-state, and yet that is precisely the overarching organizing principle of the modern Italian archival system.

It remains a curious hybrid.  Local state archives crystallize early modern Italy’s political order in part of their structure – the archives of Mantua, Venice, and Florence, for instance, serve as repositories of long defunct states.  At the same time, major state archives reflect modern Italy’s strong centralizing ambitions. Institutions function primarily at the national level, with Italy’s holy trinity of record keeping based in Rome: the church (Archivio Segreto Vaticano), the state (the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in EUR) and the colonies (the Archivio Storico Diplomatico, located in Municipio XV, slightly north of nowhere).

The latter two archives speak to the fossilization of Fascist infrastructure in contemporary architecture – a theme explored by Ruth Ben-Ghiat in her illuminating 2017 New Yorker article “Why are so many Fascist monuments still standing in Italy?”  Here, we see how these themes play out through a different kind of monument, that is, monuments to information collection. 

Both the ACS and the ASD were built under the Fascist dictatorship, with the ACS being in the EUR district, where Benito Mussolini once planned to host the 1942 World’s Fair, and the ASD, right next to the Foro Italico, once named the Foro Mussolini, still studded with statues of athletes evoking the Fascist regime’s twin obsessions with youth and sport.  In La mia casa è dove sono, Igiaba Scego recounts the uneasy jostling between the emotional layers of this site: on the top, frenzied joy – her teenage pilgrimages to cheer on athletes like Abebe Bichila, Rudi Voeller, and Diego Armando Maradona – further down, conflicted sorrow – her adult reflections of the Stadio Olimpico’s enmeshment with the Fascist imperial projects in Somalia.  Back when it was called the Stadio Cipressi, the site showcased Fascism’s ideal male bodies: slim, strong, and virile, ready for war. 

Just as religious sites tend to stay hallowed, so too do culturally meaningful buildings retain their popularity as busy attractions in our cityscapes. The Stadio has accumulated new cultural layers since Bichila ran his famous 2-hour 15 minute and 16 second marathon in 1960, smashing the world records at the time.  Add to this history the racist chants leveled at soccer stars like Mario Balotelli, Romelu Lukaku, and Ronaldo Vieira and the counter-initiatives like A.S. Roma’s June 2020 addition of ASSIEME Black Lives Matter patches to the official uniforms for the Seria A games. The Foro Italico and the Stadio Olimpico speaks to how transnational Italy fits together – however uncomfortably.  This layered complex, so physically close to the ASD, provides a useful parallel for thinking about Transnational Italian Studies approaches to the archive.

 

A statue of a person riding a horse

Description automatically generated with low confidence

Foro Italico (foreground) and Archivio Storico Diplomatico (background).  Photograph taken by Panoramio, 12 September 2015. CC BY 3.0.

 

If you study people on the move, where would you look for their histories?      

To provide a place-based schema for thinking about Transnational Italian Studies archives, we might consider four different types of sites: archives in Italy containing records about other places; archives in other places containing records about Italy; archives in third places; archives of motion itself.         

This model responds to the oft-posed question, “What is Italian about Transnational Italian Studies?”  To put this in the terms of historic example, if a farmer leaves the Veneto in 1871 for Buenos Aires, is her twenty-year old Argentine-born daughter still Italian by 1891?  Debates turn on inheritances – the persistence of Catholicism abroad, hunger for political news from home, recipes handed down across generations, or insistence on marrying within the community.  Frequently, cultural identity abroad does not fade but rather intensifies.  Whether we are talking about a rosary, a newspaper clipping, a recipe or a ring, it seems that Italianness is what you carry in your pocket.

Archives in Italy containing records from other places may speak to past imperial projects, as they do at the ASD. Wherever your story is, paper has always traveled, and it comes to rest in places of power.  So, if you’re looking for the voices of the powerful, archives like this help.  But if you want the voices of the less powerful, you’ll need to look elsewhere.  They may also speak to current flows of migration and diaspora to Italy, as in the Archivio delle memorie migranti project of the Casa della Memoria e della Storia in Rome. 

Archives in other places containing records of Italy include the many archives of Argentina (Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latino Americanos, in connection with the Centro Altreitalie), Brazil (Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo), the United States (the Italian Cultural Institute in New York) and Canada (Italian-Canadian Community Archives of Quebec) that speak to the Italian immigrant experience. 

They also include sites that never wished to become repositories of Italian history, such as formerly occupied nations like Eritrea or Ethiopia. In Eritrea, deep cultural iniquities mark archival access to key archives, like the Eritrean Documentation Center in Asmara.  This site contains an extraordinary collection of radio recordings of popular music and culture, as well as documentation of daily life ranging from changing fashion tastes to the politics of childcare, in a range of languages including Italian, Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, and English – however, tense politics make the site challenging to access, and to assess.  To the south in Ethiopia, the docents of the IES Ethnographic Museum of Addis Ababa have made some interesting decisions regarding the curation and display of Fascist Italian period history.  Set in Haile Selassie’s former palace, the exhibit includes a strange structure: a 13-step staircase to nowhere. Intended by architects to commemorate each year that Mussolini held power, the curators have placed a small Lion of Judah (the symbol of Ethiopian monarchy) atop the final step, maintaining its contours for study while also providing commentary on this history.

What these intercontinental sites might offer is a way towards a fourth kind of archive – an archive that is in motion.  In other words, a site that make space for the accumulation of historical memory without becoming precious about its collection. It would be a response to the logical fallacy: because things have been this way for a long time, that means that this is the right way.  The dust doesn’t make the archive.

At the same time, this is not a call for complete digitalization. First, because archivists who work with digital records often find themselves acting as “bucket brigades" as the National Archives put it, “chasing one ‘fire’ after another as rapidly changing technology threatens to render the media formats storing audiovisual records obsolete and inaccessible.” Second, because as the ASD and the Stadio show, many of the best archives are not archives in the traditional sense, but rather lived in buildings that accumulate meaning over time, by being lived in by us all. 

A picture containing building, outdoor

Description automatically generated

Ethnological Museum of Addis

 

A picture containing tree, sky, outdoor, street

Description automatically generated

Ethnological Museum of Addis