The Farnesina launched the project “Italians Abroad, Diaries Tell Tales”: a selection of the most significant testimonies which form part of a fund designated as ’emigration’ in the Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale of Pieve Santo Stefano, in the province of Arezzo. The stories of ‘ordinary’ Italians who lived abroad from the beginning of the 19th century to date are told in diaries, letters and memoires. Each tale contributed with an average of five pages, which were selected out of the dozens or hundreds of pages that told those stories.
Each page was digitalised from the original document, diary, memoire or letter and then transcribed, given a title and an introduction, located in time and geolocalized, indexed with key words relevant to the themes regarding the experiences of Italians living abroad from the 19th century to date. Hence, every single page became a tale accounting for a total of 1,000 stories published when the www.idiariraccontano.org website went online.
The website has also a section named ‘Your Story’ where any Italian expat may send his or her own story or those of his/her family members, thus contributing to expanding the platform collection.
