Franciska will take part in the event Stenius Savinicoordinator of the project, the historian Francesca Fausta Roosterdirector of the Department of Political Science at UNITE, the historian Luigi Ponziani of the Abruzzo Institute of Historical Research and Simone Shortleg, vice-president of the Order of Journalists of Abruzzo. Both editions are published by the Teramo publishing house Ricerche&Redazioni.
The Diary of Domenico Savini, which runs from 1854 to 1870, constitutes a documentary corpus of primary importance for the study of the economic, social, but also civil and cultural history of the City of Teramo and the large territory of the old Aprutina province of which it was capital. Almost a primary source, all the more representative as first-hand testimonies of personalities who played an eminent role in the history of Aprutina in the 19th century are still scarce. There are many reasons for this relevance: firstly the temporal breadth and daily assiduity of the diary document; therefore the historical period described which allows us to grasp step by step the political and institutional processes that prelude to the final crisis of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the birth of the new Kingdom of Italy; finally the social connections that stand out particularly clearly from the narrative and which allow us to grasp dynamics, movements, characters during a fundamental turning point in the history of Teramo, Abruzzo, and the nation: day after day, large and small characters of the society of the time, events local and national, European events with the effects they produce in the apparently distant and secluded province of the Kingdom. So the resulting story gives us a human, social and civil kaleidoscope of certain liveliness. The importance of the document also lies in the role that its drafter plays and which is not limited to his specific individuality, but is connected to a family tradition of government which, due to the economic weight assumed in a relatively short period of time, made the family Savini was an essential component of the Teramo society of the time.
Son of Sigismondo (1777-1851) mayor of Teramo in 1815 at the time of the second “realisation” of the Bourbon Kingdom, nephew of Berardo (1746-1818) and great-grandson of Ferdinando who already in 1788 had held the position of annual mayor of the city at end of the oligarchic government, Domenico (1810-1889) belonged to a family which, through its businesses, subsequent land acquisitions and properties purchased between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within the city, was among the most conspicuous, even if not among the most ancient, from the old province of Teramo. Sigismondo then, by marrying Barbara Palma, sister of Niccola, Pancrazio, Emanuele and Vincenzo in 1808, forcefully entered the city’s administrative and civil class, becoming one of its greatest expressions. Domenico himself, twice three-year mayor of Teramo in 1842 and 1852, in turn became a protagonist of the provincial economic-social and administrative life, until the fall of the southern Kingdom; but even subsequently, within the new institutional framework of the unitary state, he always had high prestige although he remained in a more secluded position than in the past.
Domenico is a Catholic who is very faithful to the precepts and canons of the Church on which he bases his daily behavior; he is a conservative with evident pro-Bourbon sentiments; he possesses a culture that is not at all superficial and a marked sensitivity that allows him to grasp and interpret originally the events that occur in his life. At the turning point of 1860-61 he did not engage in any hostile behavior towards the new government: he limited himself to an attitude of substantial dissimulation. The deprecatio temporum that he develops very rarely acquires public importance since his civil culture does not allow him to go beyond the substantial (as well as formal) respect for an idea of social order that could well lead him within the coordinates of the new unitary state once public tranquility was re-established and all anarchy was eradicated.
This originality of thought and action is well present within the Diary which thus becomes a magnifying glass capable of looking at contemporary society and identifying the nodes that envelop it in such a crucial historical period. So the information we draw from reading and studying Domenico Savini’s Diary touches on an infinite number of themes aimed at critically recomposing not only the individual life of a protagonist, but also that of a peripheral, but no less significant, territorial reality. Finance, agricultural economics, trade, agronomic techniques, daily life, social relations, popular customs and traditions, religious organization and behaviour, territorial structures, roads, atmospheric agents, city news, civil life, culture, everything finds space and arrangement inside of the diary narration which ends up summarizing much of the municipal history of Teramo and its territory. Hence the importance of the complete publication of Savin’s manuscript which, in the absence of similar documents (memoirs, correspondence) for the period considered, becomes a primary source capable of vividly representing a crucial period of our contemporary history.
