ABSTRACT
At the conclusion of her autobiographical sketch published a few years ago, the Italian historian Ilaria Porciani, living in Florence but working in Bologna, writes:
Like many Italian historians, I am a commuter. The saying that every Italian academic carries a train timetable could not be truer. The conversations which take place on Eurostars turn out to be a sort of extension of faculty or department meetings and […] this is usually the right time not only to complain about the new reforms and shortage of money but also to discuss a new book or a project. […]
But I also think that I have also been a ‘passeur’ as the French would say: a traveller between different cultural traditions and countries. I have often missed the stability of a single school and a linear track. But I have enjoyed the much richer liberty of diverse approaches.
Since I have spent and spend so much time commuting and travelling, maybe it will not come as a surprise that I started this contribution on a plane and that I have continued to write it – like others of my work – at least partly on trains: so mobile is our historians’ workshop nowadays. 1
