Massimo Mila, the Prismatic Intellectual: An Archival Case Study

This article presents a case study focusing on the archives of the Massimo Mila Collection housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basle. Mila (1910–1988) was one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century and an influential figure in Italian musical and cultural life. He was a music critic and historian, a multi-faceted and culturally engaged character. After a short profile of Mila and a description of his collection, the article focuses on its most important part, namely the large amount of letters from over 600 correspondents, including musicians, painters, art and music critics, philosophers, historians, political activists, important members of the government, and numerous intellectuals from Italy and abroad. It is mostly unpublished material, with a few exceptions. My research selects all the letters that dates from 1928 to 1956, that is, from Mila's debut as a music critic when he was just eighteen, until around age forty-five, when he was already a well-known and established figure in the world of Italian culture. The rise of Fascism, the birth of the Republic, and the first phase of reconstruction made this a period of immense upheaval for Italy and many other European nations.