In 1987, the Department of Arts and Performing Sciences later merged into the SARAS Department acquired part of the personal archive of Gerardo Guerrieri, an Italian director, critic, and theatre scholar whose work contributed to a renewed interpretative approach to theatrical language across different eras.
The Archive is divided into two main sections.
The first, of a general nature, reflects Guerrieri’s extensive work in various fields and is organized into thematic categories: Art, Actor, Biography, Cinema and Documentaries, Einaudi Collection, Scripts, Letters and Correspondence, Miscellaneous, Chronicles from Il Giorno, Pirandello, Projects, Radio, Directing, Shakespeare, Anglo-American Theatre, Italian Theatre, Theses, Russian Theatre, Materials on Guerrieri, and Various Writings.
The second section is entirely dedicated to the actress Eleonora Duse, the subject of a long and meticulous research project that spanned nearly thirty years of Guerrieri’s life.
The Archive includes typescripts, theatrical, television and radio scripts, manuscripts, letters, photographs, notes, essays, articles, and translations. These materials are stored in 153 folders for the first section and 103 for the second.
The documents are an essential resource not only for the detailed study of performances and artists significant to theatre history (Visconti, Pirandello, Valli, Gassman, Vitez, Miller, Williams, Chekhov), but also for reconstructing the intricate web of personal relationships—largely absent from existing historiography—that formed the true connective tissue of an “invisible” history of Italian theatre.
Multidisciplinary in nature, the Archive represents an open work, a research in progress—often left unfinished by Guerrieri—and lends itself particularly well to a hypertextual reading. Through investigative paths, references, bibliographic suggestions, and material analysis, it enables the reconstruction of the memory of 20th-century Italian theatre and beyond.
Themes explored in the Archive include: Luchino Visconti’s theatre, the role of the dramaturg in post-war Italian theatre, Stanislavski’s presence in Italy, Shakespeare translations, American dramaturgy, the theatrical revolution of the 1960s, and the birth of a publishing industry for the performing arts (Einaudi Theatre Collection).
Director
Stefano Locatelli
Executive Committee
Roberto Ciancarelli, Guido Di Palma, Aleksandra Jovicevic, Stefano Locatelli
Scientific Committee
Claudio Bernardi (Università Cattolica di Milano)
Paola Bertolone (Università di Siena)
Silvia Carandini (Sapienza Università di Roma)
Stefano Geraci (Università di Roma Tre)
Selene Guerrieri (Gerardo Guerrieri’s Heirs)
Laura Mariani (Università di Bologna)
Ferruccio Marotti (Sapienza Università di Roma)
Alessandro Pontremoli (Università di Torino)
Access to the physical Archive is available by appointment to researchers and students.