Massimo Mila, The Prismatic Intellectual: An Archivial Case Study

This article presents a case study focusing on the archives of the Massimo Mila Collection housed at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basle. Mila (1910-1988) was one of the great intellectuals of the 20th 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 It is mostly unpublished material, with a few exceptions.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 to say 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. The study aims to underline the immense potential of research carried out on the Massimo Mila Collection, as well as contribute to shedding further light on the wealth of interests and intellectual relationships of a figure who could quite simply be defined as “Mila the prismatic intellectual”.