Profili di donne fra carte e libri / Profiles of women among documents and books

estimonies of women’s presence have been archived and stored in libraries like delicate layers within the walls of homes and are, by the very nature of the producing subjects, fragile and frag-mentary elements, which only with great difficulty manage to emerge and represent their great cultural bearing. As a result of years of intellectual labor and occasional political activism, wom-en’s papers have only recently begun to draw the attention of Italian cultural institutions not only for their specificity, but also, and perhaps above all, because they represent a considerable piece of long-hidden Italian historical memory, concealed behind the invisible blankets of the “unspoken.” In the documentation, the female presence is often hidden within the papers that, usually, belong to male subjects; therefore, it is not always necessary to search for new documents, but sometimes it is sufficient to investigate in a different way archives and libraries that have already been ana-lyzed and studied. Only in this way is it possible to bring out the actions, to make people “aware of a heritage of experience that has been handed down to us” and “to build a memory and a tradition of such knowledge.