Carta e cartiere nell'Italia meridionale. Appunti per un bilancio storiografico

Following the first relevant ‘critical’ works by Franca Assante and Anna dell’Orefice on the history of paper in Southern Italy, which were published towards the end of the 70’s and mid-80’s of the XX century, the history on paper-manufacturing relating to this important sector in the South of Italy, has further been upgraded in the following decades, with other research and published works. In some cases, they were the result of in-depth documentary research activities conducted in public or private archive-libraries or of field surveys/works carried out with the end-goal of safeguarding sites, artefacts and existing historical machineries, which would otherwise have been left abandoned and oblivious to the public; these studies have contributed to keeping a watchful eye over tangible and intangible aspects that make up this specific sector of the Italian cultural heritage, not only as regards to experts in the field, but also and primarily within those local communities, which, especially thanks to their paper-manufacturing activities, have moulded their life environments and enlivened their ‘métier’ of paper-manufacturers in their territory over the centuries. Besides numerous works published on the two main manufacturing sites of Amalfi and Vale del Liri, further studies have been carried out on minor production-sites, from the historiographical view-point, that were operating in various provinces throughout the ancient Kingdom of Naples, along with early in-depth studies on some quite recent entrepreneurial initiatives, like the ones in Puglia and in Calabria during the early nineteen hundreds. Nonetheless, during the course of almost four decades since the pioneering works of Assante and dell’Orefice, have we rarely perceived the need to produce a historiographical evaluation on the subject. With this essay, the author wishes thus to put forward some critical observations on the status of the art in relation to these studies, with the purpose of giving impetus to the drawing up of an archaeological-industrial ‘road-map’ of paper-manufacturing sites that were set up and that have developed in Southern Italy over time.