Alessandro Portelli (born July 8, 1942) is an Italian scholar of American literature and culture, oral historian, writer for the daily newspaper il manifesto, and musicologist. He is currently a professor of Anglo-American literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza. In the United States he is best known for his oral history work, which has compared workers’ accounts of industrial conflicts in Harlan County, Kentucky and Terni, Italy.
Portelli was born in Rome in 1942, and was raised in Terni, an industrial town 65 miles to the north. His father was a civil servant, and his mother was a teacher of English. He spent his senior year of high school as an American Field Service exchange student in the Los Angeles area. He studied at the University of Rome La Sapienza, receiving degrees in law in 1966 and in English in 1972. He began working for the Italian National Research Council in 1962.
Portelli began his academic career at the University of Siena, where he taught American literature from 1974 to 1981. He moved to the faculty of human sciences at the University of Rome La Sapienza to teach American literature in 1981 and remains there to the present.
A meeting between Portelli and University of Kentucky (UK) sociologist David Walls, facilitated by journalist Beniamino Placido, during a visit by Walls to Rome, Italy in summer 1973 led to them visiting Harlan County together during a trip by Portelli to the United States that fall. Portelli returned as a James Still fellow at the UK Appalachian Center in fall 1983, and began developing his extensive oral history work in Harlan County. He also began a continuing exchange program, involving graduate students and faculty, between the UK Appalachian Center and the University of Rome La Sapienza.
Portelli’s writing has shifted the focus of oral history from whether the subject’s account is historically accurate to the meaning of the story and the nature of memory. Mary Marshall Clark of Columbia University summarizes its significance: “Portelli’s work has transformed oral history from being a kind of stepchild of history into a literary genre in its own right. He has allowed us to see oral histories as more than eyewitness accounts that are either true or false and to look for themes and structures of the stories.”
Asked to describe his biggest contribution to oral history, Portelli stated, "I brought a literary approach to narrative ... I was interested in narratives that were not factually true because it’s one of the ways through which you can get at the meaning and the subjectivity as well as the facts of what actually happened." Portelli's 1991 book based on his oral histories, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, interpreted the meaning of the differing press and oral accounts of the killing of a protesting union member. Portelli's 1999 book on the 1944 Fosse Ardeatine massacre by Nazis in Rome, The Order Has Been Carried Out, won an Oral History Association award as well as the prestigious Viareggio Prize.
In 1972 Portelli founded the Circolo Gianni Bosio, an activist collective dedicated to studying folklore, oral history, and people's culture. He chaired the group, which continued for twenty years, through 1992. Based in Rome, the collective published a journal, I Giorni Cantati, for 23 years, ending in 1995. The Circolo resumed activity in 1999 and continues to date.
Portelli has been a contributor to the independent left-wing Italian daily paper il manifesto since its founding in 1971. His commentary often includes observations on the United States.
From 2002 to 2008 he was the Mayor of Rome’s advisor for historical memory, and he served a year (2006-2007) on the City Council of Rome.
