Discovering museums: The bed sheet as a book

Pieve Santo Stefano is a Tuscan town on the Tiber bend near the border with Umbria and Emilia Romagna. Almost 3,000 people live here. Heavy fighting took place there during the Second World War, as Pieve is not far from the “Linea Gotica”, the “Gothic Position”, a defensive line that the Germans had built against the advancing Allies. This cut off the Italian peninsula at the heights of Massa-Carrara and Pesaro. German Wehrmacht troops stood north of this line, while British and US troops tried to break through the positions from the south.

In August 1944, all residents of Pieve Santo Stefano were driven out of the town by German soldiers, and the houses were mined and blown up by the soldiers during the retreat. The book “Pieve 1944” follows the activities of the German Wehrmacht (Alsaba Grafiche, 2008). The town, which was 99 percent destroyed, was quickly rebuilt, but the old town center was wiped out. Only the churches and the old town hall, decorated with family coats of arms and whose L-shaped structure is reminiscent of an open book, remained.

Since 1984, a large yellow sign has hung on all four access roads to Pieve Santo Stefano, just below the official town entrance sign: “Città del diario” (City of the Diary). On the initiative of the journalist and writer Saverio Tutino, a public archive, L’Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, was created in Pieve in 1984. Autobiographical writings from completely “normal” people are collected here, reflecting everyday life and at the same time the history of Italy in a variety of forms. They are diaries, correspondence, personal memoirs. While the Nazi soldiers wanted to wipe out the town of Pieve Santo Stefano, it is now a place of historical memory.

Only a few exhibits from the collection, which includes more than 8,000 memories, are presented in four small rooms in the town hall, in the “Piccolo Museo del Diario”, the Small Diary Museum. This was designed by the Milan design studio dotdotdot into a multimedia course with drawer shelves. Not only are autobiographical writings stored in these, some drawers in Room 1 contain a screen on which excerpts from diaries are presented.

A large part of Room 2 is dedicated to the archive’s founder, Saverio Tutino. And here too, excerpts from the archived memoirs can be heard in an “alphabet of memory”. Room 3, called “Rabito’s Room,” commemorates Vinzenzo Rabito (1899–1981), born in Chiarmonte Qulfe, Sicily. Rabito wrote 1,027 typewritten pages about his life after teaching himself to read and write. The Sicilian particularly liked the semicolon, which he repeatedly used as a separator on his “Olivetti Lettera 22”. Rabito talks about a “tormented, difficult, very despicable life.” He describes the poverty in southern Italy, his time in Libya and Abyssinia as a soldier, the landing of the Americans in Italy, the black market, the machinations of the police and mafia, the birth of his children and the art of muddling through life.

In room 4 you can see a bed sheet that has become a virtual emblem of the museum. In the winter of 1986, an elderly farmer, Clelia Marchi (1912–2006), appeared in Pieve Santo Stefano with a bedsheet under her arm. Until then, Marchi had hardly left her hometown of Poggio Rusco near Mantua. She dedicated the bed sheet to her husband, who died in a traffic accident in 1972, and wrote down her life on it in long lines, numbered from 1 to 184, with black felt-tip pens. She gave it the title “Gnanca na busia” – bedsheet book. At the top of the sides, the sheet is decorated with photos of her husband and herself, with a picture of Jesus in the middle.

After her husband’s death, Clelia Marchi began writing down her memoirs. When she ran out of paper, she remembered something her primary school teacher had told the children that the Etruscans used to wrap their mummies in sheets. “With my husband, I can no longer use the bedsheet, and so I decided to use it to write.” The bedsheet text about the simple life of the rural population near Mantua appeared in a book, also in German: “Not a single lie: a moving one Contemporary testimony of a simple Italian farmer” (Libroletto, 2013). The publishing house ilSaggiatore published a new Italian edition entitled “Gnanca na busia” in 2024.

This book is one of L’Archivio Diaristico Nazionale’s now over 200 publications. In 1998 the first issue of the in-house magazine “Prima Persona – Percorsi Autobiografici” was published. The magazine is dedicated to the general discussion of the topic of autobiography and publishes excerpts from the texts in the archive’s collection. Centers and archives of autobiographical memories, modeled on Pieve Santo Stefano, were created in Ambérieu near Lyon, in Emmendingen near Freiburg, in La Roca del Vallès in Catalonia and in Kärsämäki, Finland.

www.piccolomuseodeldiario.it