With his intellectual curiosity and analytical abilities, Enzo Rutigliano has witnessed the history of the University of Trento and the evolution of sociology and contemporary society. These qualities can easily be found in his writings and collection of documents that his family decided to donate to the University, to implement the provisions of his will, almost four years after his death.
Today, at Palazzo Sardagna, Maria Pia Cariola, heir of professor Rutigliano, and Flavio Deflorian, rector of the University of Trento, signed the donation agreement. The ceremony was also attended by Pasquale Alferj (who has managed the archive so far, on request from Rutigliano), Andrea Giorgi (professor of archival science) and Thomas Cammilleri (head of the university archives).
As soon as the inventory activities are completed, the collection will be made available to scholars at Palazzo Fedrigotti, in Rovereto, where the historical archive of the University is located. The documents will be freely accessible in compliance with the terms of the agreement between the University and the heir.
The collection includes documents written and received by Enzo Rutigliano, of considerable historical and cultural value and of proven scientific interest. "The donated collection has enormous cultural and scientific value for the historical archive of UniTrento and for the community", declares the agreement.
This is not the first time that UniTrento has received a collection. In fact, it had already happened with Sabino Acquaviva (one of the founding fathers of Italian sociology) and Paolo Prodi (who was professor, rector of the University and dean of the then Faculty of Letters). With the personal archive of Rutigliano, however, the University acquires the point of view of a central figure in the life of the University as a student and a professor. His documents testify to his interest in the University since his arrival in the city in his twenties.
Enzo Rutigliano (1944-2018) in fact had arrived in Trento in November 1968 to study sociology. In the same classrooms in via Verdi he then taught for decades History of Sociological Thought, one of the fundamental courses of the then faculty, today department, of Sociology and Social Research. His archive reveals that his student experience and his academic career (from 1976 until he retired from teaching, in 2014) are inextricably intertwined with the history of the University of Trento and the city, but also with the seasons of sociology and society as a whole.
The materials collected in Rutigliano's personal archive is divided into three parts and over a period that goes from the end of the 1960s to 2018 or, in other words, from his times as a student to the last months of his life.
First of all, the "Correspondence" of Rutigliano with various personalities. Eight folders organized in alphabetical order: from Sabino Acquaviva and Francesco Alberoni to Norberto Bobbio, Luciano Gallino, Claudio Magris, just to name a few. Four binders, one that only includes the correspondence with Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize for literature in 1981. Rutigliano was one of the first scholars in Italy to study the sociological importance of Canetti's work.
The "Documentation" is a collection of a variety of documents, both personal and linked to is work at the University of Trento. They are collected in 21 binders, of which seven of paper material and the rest including photos and DVDs and other materials, from scientific publications to newspaper clippings. Here we can find documents on the conferences and initiatives organized on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of 1968 student movement in Italy, and reviews and interviews, including the one published in the University newspaper "UniTn", that he co-founded and directed, in 2001, on the tenth anniversary of the death of Bruno Kessler. In this interview he analyzed the political foresight of Kessler and the origins of Sociology and the University of Trento as a whole.
The third part of the archive collects the "Publications", two containers of books, essays and papers. From his first works in the seventies to studies on the sociology of war, to which Rutigliano devoted himself in the last period of his life.
A conference in memory of Enzo Rutigliano
On Friday, 25 March 2022, a conference was held in the Kessler room of the Sociology Building (Trento - Via Verdi, 26) entitled "L'uso del mondo. In ricordo di Vincenzo Rutigliano". The conference has been organized by the Library Archive of Centro studi sulla storia dell’Europa orientale (CSSEO, Centre for Studies on the History of Eastern Europe) in collaboration with the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento.