Sul filo della memoria. Oralità, storia e storiografia nel racconto di Vittore Bocchetta

The representation of the self and one’s own story by witnesses who survived the horrors of history leads to an outcome in which the borders between history and story, subjective memory and archival documents, real events and individual perception of them, are always highly blurred and far from clear and well defined. Through Vittore Bocchetta’s (b. 1918) own oral and written account of his life —in which history and story, memory and myth are intertwined— and its rewriting by Giuliana Adamo in her volume Una vita contro (2012), the author has tried to legitimise the individual account with an accurate verification against the counter history offered by archival documents. Thus the witness subjective voice becomes part of a polyphony which historians must try to comprehend.