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Private 1968 and the margins: The Vicolo Cassini’s community in Macerata, Italy

The collective memory of the Italian 1968 has been defined as a ‘possessive memory’, shaped by its most influential protagonists from the main urban centres, who also became its most influential historians. The ‘marginal’ areas of the Italian movement, which was characterised by its length and breadth in geography and society, have for long time been left aside. Furthermore, persistent ‘dark sides’ and historiographical gaps still remain to be explored. One of these is the ‘private side’ of 1968, in particular, with regard to the ‘family’ and its alternative everyday lifestyles, strikingly within a movement whose main historical characteristic has been defined as ‘the emergence of subjectivity in the public sphere’. This article addresses these two main neglected aspects of the Italian 1968, the geographical margins and the ‘private side’ of the family and alternative lifestyles, by concentrating on a provincial area of the Marche region (Macerata), in Central Italy. Exploring memories and raw material through oral history and micro-historical focus, it concentrates on a group of militants attempting to set up an alternative ‘hippy’ community and to experience alternative lifestyles. By looking at their collective memory and experience of 1968 in contention as well as in dialogue with codified histories and master-narratives, it will be shown that dominant categories and the codified historiography of the Italian movement either do not apply or have a different meaning. In doing so, I will argue that memory can shed light on the relevance of ‘place’, as well as on the relationship between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, in the historical understanding of the essence and legacy of 1968.