In September 2024, the annual celebration to award the Pieve Prize to the most significant diary among those collected by the National Diary Archive will be held in Pieve Santo Stefano (province of Arezzo, Tuscany, Italy). The event, which will reach its 40th edition this year, has been enriched since 2012 with a significant addition hosting within its program a special award to the finalists of the competition DiMMi-Multimedial Migrant Diaries, created to promote the collection and archiving of autobiographical writings of people with a history of migration in Italy and backed, among others, by the Archive of Migrant Memories.

This year the event will be further enriched, with the integration of DiMMi’s experience within the Ithaca project in the form of a brand new “ITHACA Diary Contest”, thanks to which the annual contest for the collection of autobiographies written by migrant people has been opened to other countries in the Mediterranean and beyond.

In anticipation of the September event, another important milestone in this intersection between the paths of the Ithaca project and the stories of DiMMi saw the collaboration with Italian publisher Terre di Mezzo, which since 2018 has published an annual anthology that collects all finalist stories of the DiMMi competition. Thanks to a joint effort that involved the research team of the Archive of Migrant Memories collaborating with publisher and authors, the “Ithaca Series” has been launched: a new series of autobiographical short stories in multiple languages (including English, French, Arabic and Parsi), made available in Open Access on Ithaca’s online platform. The Ithaca Series was inaugurated with the reprinted Open Access publication of short stories by Afghan Mohammad Reza Hosseini (Terre di mezzo Publisher, 2020) and Ivorian Dominique Boa (Terre di mezzo Publisher, 2020).

The ITHACA Series will continue with the publication of a selection from the ITHACA Diary Contest.