Pitigliano, Maryland? Travelling Memories and Moments of Truth
Pitigliano is the birthplace of Giannetto Paggi (1852–1916), a Jewish teacher who opened the first Italian school in Tripoli and was celebrated as ‘the pioneer of Italian civilization in Libya’ in the colonial and Fascist decades. The chapter considers the mobility of memory as a series of intersubjective and translational processes. It draws on Luisa Passerini’s concept of intersubjectivity, Naomi Leite’s ethnography of affinity and Francesco Ricatti’s ‘emotion of truth’ to engage with the processes of identification and knowledge exchange that emerged through the fieldwork. Spadaro explores the webs of imaginative and emotional interconnections linking her interviewees with the stories of Giannetto Paggi and Pitigliano, and, by extension, with narratives of Italianness and Jewishness across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.