Dalla spiga al fusillo. Descrizione e comunicazione del patrimonio documentario sulla lavorazione del grano nell’età contemporanea

Although agriculture is one of the central sectors of our country and wheat represents a fundamental production axis, the historical reconstruction dedicated to it is still not fully known. The archival sources in this field not only provide evidence of agricultural history but also show an important cross-section of economic, social, building and territorial history. This paper is based on a number of questions that aim to shed light on the heterogeneous and polymorphous documentary heritage of cereal production in the contemporary age in its various phases. The aspects that are of interest are many, as are the subjects producing the documents, which differ both in terms of their preservation purposes, but also in terms of the methods of tradition and above all, today, in terms of communication and dissemination strategies. In this sense, the exemplary case of the Barilla Historical Archive (Archivio Storico Barilla) represents a point of arrival, thanks also to heritage marketing that exposes memory with an easily accessible exhibition project. But what are the archives that represent the threads and warps of this complex agrarian fabric? How do we organise the documentary heritage that bears witness to production and commercial processes related to wheat in all its stages of transformation? Why is there a need to preserve (or not preserve) the historical memory of a tradition that has become a business?