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This chapter provides a list and a brief description of files and documents where the name of Piero Sraffa is mentioned and are currently kept at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato and at the Archivio Storico Diplomatico. For each file or document we provide indication of the reference number where it is conserved and a transcription of one or two of the relevant documents out of more than 500 which have been located. The purpose of the chapter is to illustrate the results of archival research of the last decade, including more recent findings, and furnish a groundwork for further research, which may throw further light on documents already known to us, and lead to the discovery of new documents or information, so as to provide a better basis for the reconstruction of the biography of Piero Sraffa and of people whose lives entwined with his – Antonio Gramsci certainly ranking high among them.

The essay builds a timeline of the friendship and intellectual intercourse between Sraffa and Wittgenstein with data from both their Cambridge Pocket Diaries (CPDs) and their correspondence and biography. The timeline distinguishes five phases: their first meetings until June 1930, the time in which their weekly conversations run uninterrupted (October 1930–June 1933); the period in which the enchantment of their previous meetings was broken (October 1933–July 1936); the following decade in which their meetings were in some years intense, in others nearly inexistent, until Sraffa decided to put an end to their conversations; and finally the years preceding Wittgenstein’s death. The meetings between Sraffa and Wittgenstein from their CPDs are listed in the Appendix.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.