Troubles and satisfactions of a valiant librarian: new documentation about Guerriera Guerrieri from her personal archival file preserved at the Central State Archive

Abstract

Guerriera Guerrieri is a protagonist of the Italian cultural history of the last century, remembered for the intensity of her work and for the multiplicity of initiatives and actions that characterized her professional activity as a librarian and which still allow us today to remember her as a figure of absolute importance in Italy; among these, the development of cataloging rules, the cataloging of periodicals and the diffusion of books and reading, activities which he carried out with an awareness not only about librarianship, but also about cultural and bibliographical aspects. Guerrieri's professional and personal life, however, was not simply dotted with satisfactions and successes, but the war, some family deaths, the instability of a residence, and envy and slander exacerbated by the fact that she was a capable and esteemed woman in her own environment, forced her to resist tenaciously until she was discharged from service. To the analysis and contextualization of the information already known, this essay adds the critical presentation of others documents from the numerous documents contained in his personal file preserved in Rome at the Central State Archive.