Le lettere di via Pasubio

The archive Ferrante had been donated to the institute in fourteen boxes of cardboard the month before, without an inventory and without instructions.

To Clara Mantovani had been been assigned the box number nine, labelled in hand with the words "Correspondence miscellaneous».

Inside, beneath a bundle of bills and receipts from the years seventies, there was a small bundle tied with a length of twine red already fragile. Twenty envelopes, still sealed, all addressed to the same person: Ida Ferrante, Via Pasubio 12, Milan.

The stamps bore the date of the 1943. Not one had been been opened.

Clara stayed still with the bundle in hand. The protocol was clear: catalogue, number, do not open the correspondence private without authorisation. And yet the twine red was already giving under her fingers fingers.

The letters had been been written by a certain Emilio Carli from a camp in internment in the Veneto. The tone was calm, almost domestic, as if if the author had wanted to spare the recipient the horror of reality.

Clara read the first three in standing, beside the table of cataloguing. By the fifth she sat down. Emilio was asking about Ida with an intimacy that was not that of a simple friendship simple friend. Ida Ferrante, Clara knew knew, had been later married with the founder of the company Ferrante.

The letters had never been arrived to their destination. Someone had intercepted them and kept them. Clara looked for the name of Emilio Carli in the registers of the internees online. She found him found in a few minutes: died in the winter of 1944.

She stayed in the archive until after nightfall had fallen. The next day she wrote a report formal in which which she recommended that the letters be treated letters as testimony historical of the first category. In the form for acquisition, in the space reserved for notes, she wrote only three words: "Not delivered. »

Nobody in the institute understood why Clara had been crying. But nobody asked her, because an archivist who weeps is an archivist who has done well their own work.