Archivi culturali tra memoria d'autore e memoria d'editore

The article focuses on the role of institutions, in Italy and in other European countries, which preserve editorial archives (Deutsches Literaturarchiv di Marbach, imec, Centro per gli studi sulla tradizione manoscritta di autori moderni e contemporanei - University of Pavia, Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, Centro Apice - University of Milan). The existence of these centres is particulary relevant nowadays when we risk to lose a recent past, perhaps the last heritage of a “culture of paper”. Recent studies have focused on the different typologies of cultural archives and on the the difficulty to let speak those documents that have often been selected by the author or publisher, with a partial and oriented construction, as all self-representations.