The documentary collections of the Centre

Federico, Michele, and Giulia Sanguineti have entrusted the Center with a substantial body of documents on loan, which is currently undergoing cataloguing. At the present stage of the work, the following documents stand out:

• 586 letters addressed to the eldest son, currently the subject of a doctoral dissertation that will lead to a complete critical edition;
• numerous original typescripts of both poetic and prose works;
• 1,700 new thematic and lexicographic cards, which will be integrated into the Lexicographic Archive (see below);
• hundreds of newspaper and magazine clippings, some linked to Sanguineti’s lexicographic interests, others grouped according to thematic clusters;
• working materials related to Sanguineti’s published works, produced in collaboration with various nationally and internationally recognized publishers, offering insight into every stage of the creative process;
• little-known or entirely un-known photographs.

In the article Memorie di un lessicomane («Unità», 8 April 2004), Sanguineti described himself as a «lessicomane ufficiale semiautopatentato», emphasizing a lifelong passion for lexicography that ran parallel to his multifaceted intellectual journey, spanning criticism, poetry, fiction, theatre, cinema, musical librettos, translation, and journalism. Driven on one hand by his own "lexicomania" and on the other by the demands of his professional work as a lexicographer – he was director of 2004 and 2009 Supplements to the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, co-editor of Grande Dizionario dell’Uso, and the author of lexicographic columns for newspaper and magazines – Sanguineti was throughout his life an avid collector of words. His lexicographic archive consists of around 70,000 attestations, collected on typed cards. These contain novel excerpts, verses of poetry, passages from journalistic articles, and newspaper clippings with notes, glosses, and underlinings next to occurrences of new of noteworthy terms. In the Prefazione to the 2004 Supplement – penned by Luca Terzolo – the Sanguineti archive is described as a «mole imponente di materiali preziosissimi» and as a «magazzino di un grande poeta». Terzolo was in fact the first to grasp the significance and intricate structure of these materials, ever since Sanguineti spoke to him about the archive's creation during a little-known interview conducted on March 31, 2004. Just days before his passing, Terzolo chose to entrust that very interview to the Wunderkammer Archive. This extraordinary collection, which preserves the traces of Sanguineti's decades-long literary research and omnivorous reading habits, was partially used in the preparation of both the Battaglia dictionary and the Grande Dizionario dell’Uso by Tullio De Mauro. For this reason, it was originally housed at the UTET publishing house. Thanks to a fruitful collaboration between the University and the Turin-based publishing house, in 2014 the Sanguineti archive was entrusted on loan to the Department of Humanities at the University of Turin, and since 2016 it has been one of the 'techas' of the Wunderkammer. Beginning in 2017, it was finally possible to devote to the Lexicographic Archive the attention and visibility that a resource of such cultural value deserves, through various research and outreach initiatives. The work carried out so far has laid the groundwork for a systematic examination and interrogation of the materials of the Sanguineti archive, ultimately making the documentary heritage it contains accessible and available for use.

The institutional documents preserved in the Historical Archive of the University of Turin make it possible to reconstruct in detail both Edoardo Sanguineti’s university education (1949–1956) and his academic career in Turin, soon interrupted (1957–1970). Available materials from his time as a student include enrollment applications, study plans, the grade booklet, and his three-volume thesis Interpretazione di Malebolge, submitted in 1956 under the supervision of Giovanni Getto (see L. Resio, Dante “compagno di strada”. Edoardo Sanguineti e il “romanzo” della 'Commedia', in Publications). The documents in his personal file allow for a detailed reconstruction of the stages of his academic career, from volunteer assistant to full assistant—a position he held until 1970. He was assigned teaching duties for just one year, in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature (1965–66). The minutes of Faculty meetings reflect the atmosphere of division and distrust that eventually led Sanguineti to leave Turin. Sanguineti’s records held at ASUT have been fully inventoried and digitized (images are available at this link). The cataloging process within the Wunderkammer database is currently being finalized: each document will be assigned metadata that will make it searchable and accessible online.

In recent years, previously unpublished or little-known documents have also been added to the Wunderkammer, comingfrom private archives or otherwise falling outside the collections described so far. Among these are, for example, the recording of a seminar given by Sanguineti at the DAMS program in Turin in 2004 (the transcript appears in the volume Un poeta al cinema, edited by Franco Prono and Clara Allasia—see the Publications section on this site), and an interview conducted by Luca Terzolo with Edoardo Sanguineti (Passione cultura, a DVD produced for internal use by Utet-Garzanti Grandi Opere in 2004 and intended for distribution to agents), which Terzolo himself donated to the Wunderkammer archives.

Thanks to the valuable collaboration with the Fondazione Mario Novaro Onlus in Genoa, more than one hundred articles on Sanguineti—published from 1965 to the present in various newspapers and magazines—have also recently been catalogued. The inventory (available at this link and reproduced below) will soon be supplemented by full transcriptions of the texts, making a rich documentary heritage—often difficult to access—available to the public.

The presence in Turin of Bibliomediateca Rai del Centro di Produzione di Torino allows access to a vast collection of material on the author, who, over the years was open to sharing his personal reflections and actively collaborated in the production of valuable radio programs. The television and radio interviews given by Sanguineti between the 1960s to 2010, preserved by TecheRAI, were the focus of a research project aimed at locating, transcribing, and contextualizing them within the artistic and cultural environment in which they were produced. This work has deepened our understanding of the relationship between Sanguineti’s critical output and the many interviews he gave during the same period. A second research project is currently underway, focusing on the recovery and transcription of Edoardo Sanguineti's Lezioni di letteratura italiana.