Guerriera Guerrieri

Guerriera Guerrieri: In her name and surname, a trace of the event that marked the professional story of the «Lady of Books». In her signature, she shares her greatest merit: having safeguarded the bibliographic heritage threatened by war (Second World War, ed.), which earned her, in 1968, the gold medal for cultural merit and, from ’8 March 2023, the naming of the monumental Reading Hall of the National Library of Naples. A name, a destiny, for a woman who with courage, tenacity, and foresight was able to face the danger of the bombs and faced first the German occupiers, retreating former allies, then the American forces, and even some Neapolitan criminals looking for something to resell. He was born in Cortona, Tuscany, in 1902, and moved to Naples where he studied at the State Archives, graduating in Paleography and Archival Doctrine. He then continued at the University of Naples Federico II, where he graduated in Classics in 1926. She was hired by the Vittorio Emanuele III National Library of Naples, became its director from the early ‘40s to 1967 and in the dark years of the war, she was responsible for the transport and safety of book materials in the various shelters located in the Campania area such as the Monastery of Montevergine and the Abbey Palace of Loreto. The personal and historical events of those years were reconstructed in detail in the War Diary 1943-1945, an analytical account of those terrible moments, which was published only in 1980, the year of his death. From 1952 to 1972, he also taught Library Science at the Advanced School for Librarians and Archivists of Federico II and, later, at the Faculty of Education of the University of Salerno. After the war he promoted the establishment of the AIB (Italian Library Association), of which he held the presidency uninterruptedly from 1948 to 1976. As Maria Iannotti, director of the National Library, stated on the occasion of the naming of the Reading Room, Guerrieri was: «An example of a combative, tenacious and determined woman, but also of a passionate scholar and librarian. His commitment and dedication to carrying out his mission as a librarian until the last days of his life remind us that to carry out our work competently, one cannot ignore civic commitment, which means promoting the right to reading, knowledge and information as the right of all».