Tomaso Montanari resigns from the CS Beni Culturali. Franceschini arrogance over De Pasquale appointment.

Art historian Tomaso Montanari has just announced that he has resigned from the Consiglio Superiore dei Beni Culturali, of which he is a member as chairman of the Technical-Scientific Committee for Fine Arts (he had been appointed as a member of the committee in the technical quota, by the National University Committee).

The reason for the resignation was briefly introduced by Montanari in a tweet: “Today I resigned from the Superior Council of Cultural Heritage,” the scholar wrote, “to denounce the arrogance of Minister Dario Franceschini in the appointment of the superintendent of the Central State Archives, an apologist for Rauti.” Montanari then announced that he will further explain the reasons for his gesture tomorrow in Il Fatto Quotidiano, the newspaper in which he usually writes.

Everything, in short, starts from the appointment of Andrea De Pasquale as head of theCentral State Archives, which was the subject of bitter controversy, in which Montanari himself had intervened, citing both technical reasons (De Pasquale was described as a librarian “with archival experience totally irrelevant to that crucial role”) and political reasons, because of the precedent linked to the acquisition of the Rauti fund for the National Central Library of Rome. Minister Dario Franceschini also intervened on De Pasquale’s appointment, responding this morning to Paolo Bolognesi, president of the Association among the Families of the Victims of the Bologna Station Massacre, to explain the reasons for the appointment (“I considered dott. De Pasquale the most suitable because, in addition to possessing the necessary qualifications as an archivist, he has, in recent years, very effectively directed the National Central Library in Rome,” the culture minister wrote) and to reassure about the transparency with which De Pasquale will carry out his work (“I would like to tell you that concerns have no reason to exist,” Franceschini wrote. “This is also demonstrated by the words of a few days ago with which the new director dispelled any doubts about his total commitment on ensuring the fruition of the documents subject to declassification in accordance with the directives.”).

However, the minister’s words were not deemed sufficient by the environment. They were immediately commented on by the presidents of the committees for the victims of the Bologna massacres, Paolo Bolognesi, Piazza Fontana, Carlo Arnoldi, Piazza Loggia, Manlio Milani, and the Italicus train, Franco Sirotti, by the Mario Amato family as well as by the Mi Riconosci association, who deemed them insufficient. “The minister,” wrote Bolognesi, Arnoldi, Milano, Sirotti, Amato and Mi Riconosci in a joint letter, “ignores in the letter the fact that De Pasquale, although trained in part as an archivist (the more or less clear division between the two training paths is a recent thing), entered the Ministry as a librarian and, as can be seen in his resume, has always directed libraries and never an archive, which has different rules and needs. That his first managerial experience in the field is the Central State Archives makes a certain impression, not least because this would ignore a 2008 law that requires having an archivist official as director of the archives” (a reason for the latter that had also been stressed by Montanari).

Franceschini, in his note, wrote that the note celebrating Rauti had been withdrawn and was not to be attributed to De Pasquale. However, the signers of the response point out, the minister “omits to say that the inauguration, which was scheduled on Pino Rauti’s birthday and canceled due to Covid, was replaced by a video that his daughter filmed inside the national library, and that the message, prepared by the family but disseminated on all library channels, described Rauti as ’an organizer, thinker, scholar, journalist. As active and creative as he was reflective and critical’, keeping quiet of course about his decades of activism against the state and the Republic, while the fund was described as ’a first-rate source of political information and also a valuable reference point of a cultural nature’. Above all, however, the fund, set up following the family’s instructions, is still there, consultable only with prior authorization, without adequate contextual tools and a hasty biographical note on Rauti in its part relating to Ordine Nuovo, stragism, black subversion and subsequent investigations, risking providing Library users with a partial and misleading tool on the figure of the neo-fascist militant and the years of the ’strategy of tension: a presence that immediately took on a political flavor, as also claimed by donor Isabella Rauti in the above-mentioned interventions.”

The petitioners also point the finger at the fact that De Pasquale, when he was director of the National Central Library, was involved in 2017 in the affair of the "scontrinisti,“ 22 ”volunteers“ who that year denounced that they actually worked with specific shifts and tasks, and were paid on an expense reimbursement basis through the delivery of receipts of up to 400 euros per month. ”The director,“ the petitioners explain, ”not only did not make an effort to protect these workers, but there is also no real record of distancing himself from them in the news reports of the time. In May, the ticket collectors received a text message asking them to stop showing up for work, and a few days later a new call for volunteers paid with expense reimbursement was published.“ Franceschini, in his response to Bolognesi, made no mention of this matter. ”In short,“ the petitioners conclude, ”the minister not only did not unravel the doubts regarding the new director’s ability to maintain scientific autonomy (the fact that he was not aware of the announcement about Pino Rauti, as Dario Franceschini implies, appears to be anaggravating), but completely ignored the doubts regarding the strange choice of appointing a librarian with archival skills, and not an archivist, as director of the most important State Archives, and the past record regarding the exploitation of free labor."

Now everyone is renewing their call for Franceschini to revoke the appointment. Montanari himself hoped that the victims’ associations could challenge the appointment: “it would be important,” he wrote in Il Fatto Quotidiano, “because for years now a fierce cultural campaign has been underway by a more or less openly fascist right-wing: a battle whose objective is nothing less than state revisionism. That is, the erasure of the history that tells what fascism really was, and what the criminal neo-fascism of the second half of the twentieth century was.”

Tomaso Montanari resigns from the CS Beni Culturali. Franceschini arrogance over De Pasquale appointment.

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