Sandro Portelli, March 3, 2011
I met Alessandro Portelli late in the afternoon in his small office at the University of Rome, up a winding stone staircase from the courtyard and down the narrow hallways through knots of students awaiting classes, lounging on wooden benches and sharing hugs, notes, news of the day. He was finishing an interview with a reporter, and I sat nearby. Sandro Portelli has a round, animated face, twinkling dark eyes and bushy eye-brows, half-glasses perched on his nose. He laughs easily, with a quick boyish smile that makes him look suddenly half his age.
Portelli is professor of American Literature in the Department of Language and Literature in the School of the Humanities, a center of important innovative scholarship and intellectual courage for many years, but clearly occupying no exalted space—if real estate is any indicator— in the larger scheme of things here. He’s best known in the states for The Death of Luigi Trastulli which marked a critical turn in oral history, a turn toward