Introducing Guglielmo Giannini: A digital archive of theatre, film, entertainment and political activism

This article introduces the 'Guglielmo Giannini: A digital archive of theatre, film, entertainment and political activism' built by the author at Deakin University between 2014 and 2019. It explains that a man famous as a founder of twentieth century (global) populism can be re-framed, through the archive. Not 'just' a politician, part of Italy's founding constituent government in 1946, Giannini was also a man who was active first in journalism, and then important to twentieth century Italian theatre, film, and literature. Providing reflections on the novelty of the historical materials contained for the first time in an accessible archive, the article then explores the care Giannini gave to his own materials, as well as the necessity of looking across different disciplinary archives and material ephemera in order to build a nuanced view of Giannini's populist appeal. As the author argues, without Giannini's training in the arts, and without the care he invested in his personal holdings, the spectacle of populist politics might be wrongly framed today as a recent or novel phenomenon,