The historian Giuseppe Berta and the three 'gaps' he leaves behind

Giuseppe Berta's death leaves a deep and manifold void. Berta, who passed away at the age of seventy-one after a long and painful illness, leaves first and foremost a cultural and interpretative void in the historical reconstruction of the economic and industrial, cultural and political identity of twentieth-century Italy.

Vercellese by birth, Turinese by adoption, he worked for a long time on the Turin-Milan axis. He did so by writing fundamental pages on the industrialism of northern Italy. He was in charge of the Fiat historical archive, but always maintained a measured independence from the Agnelli family and its interests, with an authoritativeness - never moralistic, but often permeated by an irony that never became sarcasm - acknowledged by all. He wrote important contributions on Fiat, but also on Olivetti and the Gruppo Finanziario Tessile. The heart, therefore, of Italian manufacturing in its North-West declination.

The second gap left by Berta is one of method. Before the advent of economic history bent on the sterile quantitative drift of the American matrix, he belonged to that (last) generation of economic historians who combined literary training and the social sciences, practised a non-obsessive but calibrated reading of company balance sheets and statistics in major scenarios, he was aware that archive work is just as important as courting the editors-in-chief of international journals, he cultivated a taste for current affairs that, in an Anglo-Saxon style, made him a commentator sought after by newspapers, radio and television.

The third void that Giuseppe Berta - simply Beppe to his friends - leaves behind is human. Because, in an academically lateral position that in Italy saw him never holding a full professor's chair in economic history but assigned the position of associate professor in contemporary history, he always had a personal and intellectual characteristic: generosity. He was not a baron. But he had many students. In universities, especially abroad, in research centres, in the industrial associations he frequented (in particular the Union in Turin's Via Fanti, but at times also Viale dell'Astronomia in Rome), in publishing houses, companies and newspapers, many people were grateful to him for the time, patience, sense of fun, love of culture and the world and interest in others with which he nourished his life.